Word cloud pipeline

A simple pipeline to generate a word cloud between you and another individual from Facebook messenger messages and from Android SMS messages.

Steps

1. Get a copy of the Facebook messages/conversation of interest. This can be done by logging into Facebook, and then going to Settings -> Your Facebook Information -> Download Your Information, and then selecting Messages. Make sure you download the conversations in JSON.

2. Get a copy of your SMS messages. If you have an Android phone, you can download SMS Backup & Restore and follow the steps to back-up/copy your messages. Make sure you download the conversations in XML.

3. Pass the JSON and XML messages to the script parser.py, which will convert these formats into plain text format in a file named plain.txt. Example usage:

   python parser.py -x /path/to/xml/convo_foo.xml -j /path/to/json/convo_foo.json -o /out/path
   

4. Go online and pick from any of the myriad word cloud visualizers out there that accept plain text files as input, and upload plain.txt to visualize it. I like Tag Crowd since it allows some options for how to treat different words (ex: word frequencies, excluding words, etc.). If you're looking for a particular shape, Word Art has a bunch. Note however, that the images may be slightly worse quality unless you pay for downloading in HQ.