Visualizing Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas Album Lyrics With A Word Cloud

Visualizing Relationships Of Words In Leonard Cohen’s Lyrics

A simple pie chart or bar graph can sometimes illuminate a mathematical relationship between sets of values more effectively than the most elegant formula. Similarly a visual method of displaying the relationships and connections within a body of text may yield insights that have proved elusive to capture by listening to or reading the lyrics.

Word clouds, aka wordles, display specific words in a size proportional to the number of times that word is used in a given set. The word clouds on this page are based on the words in the songs on Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas album;¹ the two wordles (one black and white and one in color) are differently formatted but each shows the same data. (click on images to enlarge)

Customize Your Own Word Cloud

Viewers can customize the Leonard Cohen Old Ideas Album Lyrics Word Cloud with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes as well as variant language choices at Interactive Word Cloud: Leonard Cohen Old Ideas Album Lyrics.

1. By default, the visualization treats different letter cases (“Hello” vs. “hello”) as different words and filters out common words (such as “the”). The “Language” menu lets you adjust these settings. The data set includes all lyrics from the songs on Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas Album. Titles & credits are not included. Each instance of repeated words and lines (e.g., a chorus) is included. This system does not handle certain characters well so I also replaced each ampersand with an “and” and deleted all apostrophes. [↩]