Want to visualize some text in a new way? Wordle is a webtool that can generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. You can copy and paste text, put in a webpage, or enter text into the tool. The tool gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can adjust the Wordle by selecting different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. After your Wordle is done, you can print them out, save them, or post in the Wordle gallery.
On the Wordle site they have some examples which include a Wordle of the United States Constitution, and an image that I’m guessing a high school student created. The Wordle website was created in 2009 by Jonathan Feinberg and part of the application are owned by IBM.
I had some fun playing with the tool. I made a Wordle by copying and pasting the minutes from a committee I am on at work, another from my blog, and one from my artist statement. It is interesting to see what images are larger – which shows what was repeated and brings out the key points.
The Wordle posted above is the RSS feed from the blog – so this Wordle is from the last 10 days of posts.
Links:
http://www.wordle.net/