Wordle—Visually Impressive, But Useful Too

If you don’t yet know about Wordle, you should go check it out.

Wordle describes itself is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like.”

I first discovered the site from the blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, where someone cleverly entered the entire text of Moby Dick. The result is not only fascinating for a Melville fan (though it’s no shock that ‘Whale’ is the most frequent word) but also visually attractive. It kind of even looks like a Whale (is that a stretch?).

Clearly, Wordle is very inventive, and addictive, too. But it’s a lot more than a toy. After useless, time-wasting Wordles I made from song lyrics or speech transcriptions (my first impulse was to enter DFW’s famous, outrageously brilliant Kenyon graduation speech; if you’re wondering, his most frequently used word, appropriately, was “think”), I finally got around to entering the text of my senior English thesis. A screen shot is below (I am too inept to figure out how to embed it directly, but here’s a link to the better-quality version from the public gallery).

Anyway, I’m only 22 pages through, so the startling realization that I’ve used the term “meanwhile” as much as some of the authors’ names (like Talese) was extremely helpful. I’m starting to see Wordle as, quite possibly, an indispensable tool for writers in determining the frequency of their diction, and maybe opening their eyes to certain buzz words that they use more often than they intend.

Welp, go see for yourself. Very awesome.

~ by DBR on November 6, 2008.