A teaching device, made while preparing a lecture for an undergraduate class in new media and journalism: the nine principles of journalism published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism were fed through a word-cloud generator, so the profession’s own vocabulary could be seen by weight rather than read down as a numbered list. The cloud was posted at a size that could be enlarged for closer reading.
The point of the exercise was pedagogic rather than analytical. A list of nine principles reads as nine separate obligations of equal standing. Weighted by how often its words recur, the same text shows which ideas a profession keeps returning to when it is asked to describe itself, which makes it a cheap way to open a seminar on what a code of practice actually emphasises and what it only mentions once.
Word clouds were a common classroom tool in 2009, when a handful of free web services made them trivial to produce from any block of text. The nine principles have outlasted the fashion for the format.