Downtown in distress: How we built the word cloud

As part of a recent poll, The Oregonian/OregonLive asked 600 people living in the Portland area to list three words of their own choosing to describe downtown. This word cloud illustrates the results, with the size of words scaled to depict how often poll respondents used them.

Here’s how we created the illustration.

Respondents provided about 1,750 words – some people refused to answer or said, “Don’t know.” We eliminated those words from the list along with one expletive. We also ditched words that were only referenced once or twice.

From there, we combined a few words that were similar. For instance, a large number of respondents said “dirty” and “filthy.” We decided the meaning behind the words were similar enough to combine as one category and we led with “dirty,” which had been used the most among the group. The “dirty” category was the second most frequent with 95 references.

We also combined the words “riots,” “riot,” “the riots,” “rioters” and “rioting,” which was the fourth most frequently used category with 51 references.

“Homeless” and “homelessness” garnered the most references with 131 mentions. We combined the two and originally chose to feature the word “homelessness” in the cloud. However, because it was the longest word in the group, the illustration made it unfairly outsized to the other words. We opted for “homeless,” which more accurately lined up with the other commonly cited words.

Lastly, some people used phrases, such as “it’s a mess,” which we categorized as “mess” in the third largest category with 75 mentions, including “trash,” “trashed,” “mess,” “garbage,” “messy” and “dump.”

Here’s the full list of words that respondents provided.

-- Laura Gunderson

lgunderson@oregonian.com; 503-221-8378