Script Monkey Blog – Word Clouds with D3.js

A blog about making word clouds for data visualisation with D3.js

3^rd September 2021

D3.js is the goto library for data visualisation. Building on the work done by Jason Davies who made a cool word cloud api, we have made this page to show how easy it is to create these clouds when we stand on the shoulders of others.

Paste text below and click 'Go' to make a new cloud.

When I reflect on how we got to this point as a species, it strikes me that with capitalism as the driver for almost every country, profit is the sole target. This leads to a situation where someone, somewhere will always spend less to increase margin and the same people usually make more money (until they get caught if breaking regulations/laws). If you buy into this premise, then the challenge in the next 10-20 years is how to spend more on reducing carbon when other jurisdictions will spend less. It is a karmic building situation - the developed countries polluted the rest of planet in their rush for profit, and now want the rest of the planet to reduce carbon emissions for the benefit of all. In less regulated regions, this will simply not happen because those same regions are profit based and are now the manufacturing base for the West which has transited to a service economy. I think Karl Marx speculated on this in Das Kapital 100+ years ago. To use a swimming metaphor, we peed in the pool and rushed to the clean end. We then try to police a bunch of leaky bladders we peed on with the slogan "clean water for everyone". The irony for me is that developed countries will make good business out of sustainability and because of volume, the related technology will become cheaper and cheaper, eventually, becoming economically viable, just like wind turbines have now. The issue is that in parallel with this development, what we used to call “third world countries” will continue with old CO2 emission tech and with the ever-increasing populations of those countries, the CO2 hitting the environment will increase, only decreasing when those same developing countries adopt the new and cheaper tech created here, in say 20-30 years. By then, we will have 3+ degrees rise in temps, my place up a hill in Kent will be on the new London Riviera and my kids will be wearing space suits to go to work to avoid death by UV. Sort of depressing really unless humans have a paradigm shift in thinking in the next 5 years and find a way to globally cooperate. I don’t see that happening and am reminded of Carl Sagan talking about the little blue dot…

Making Word Clouds with D3.js