I’m not usually a fan of word clouds. They’re flashy but don’t really tell you much, and they seem like a pretty lazy analysis that you do if you don’t know what else to say about a text. Having said that…this word cloud is actually pretty cool. The text is the Minamata Convention on Mercury and it was produced on wordle.com. It’s a visually pleasing color scheme and layout, but of course the real reason I like it is because the text is very close to my heart, as I’ve spend the last several years negotiating it together with 140 other governments. I like the idea that a text that represents such a huge amount of collective effort on the part of hundreds of people around the world can be represented in a little graphic like this.