Preparing for visualizations
One of the basic tools of data analysis is visualization. Good, flexible visualizations make it easier to explore and understand the data, and this is useful at all stages of the data analysis process. At the beginning, visualizations make it easier to find errors and inconsistencies and to get to know your data and developing an intuition for it. It continues to drive insights throughout the process. In the end, visualizations make great supporting evidence and explanations in reports and presentations.
Visualizations will be an important part of this chapter and in understanding the results of topic modeling. To create and interact with the graphs, we're going to use some software that's recently become an important part of many data scientists' toolkits: the Web browser.
As we did in Chapter 1, Network Analysis – The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, we'll use D3 (http://d3js.org/) and ClojureScript (https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/).
The graph of the word...
