This image is an initial text visualization of the posts in the MOOC I am studying. I have just spent the morning data scraping, copying text from the posts and pasting them into a spreadsheet. There are still a handful more of posts I have not yet copied, and it’s a tedious process, but it did give me a feel for the discussions in the specific forum area.

Generated with textisbeautiful.net, the visualisation shows words that appear frequently together. They are grouped by color. I would like to explore the changing communication patterns so I will probably compare a few visualisations based on date. The web site also has two other options for displaying the visualisation, so I will need to go back to the readings to figure out an analytical frame for the data.

Below is a tentative cover page for the artefact.