Word Clouds as Works of Art

Bufkinite@evpl — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:51:00 GMT

Noodling around on the web is great fun because in doing so, I sometimes find things that I end up being amazed by, but would otherwise never have thought interesting. The web site wordle.net is one such example. You can enter any text into it - love letters, web pages, emails, anything! - and it will create a word cloud which gives greater prominence to words appearing more frequently in the source text.

You can play around with the results, changing fonts, color schemes, the direction of the type (e.g. horizontal or vertical), and the overall layout. The results are surprising, and very often stunning.

I'm a word person - I not only love to use words, I enjoy finding just the right word, and am frequently peeved (friends say more than I should be) by the unnecessary use of words, or the incorrect use of words. (Don't even get me started on words like "digitalization" or "irregardless"!) So finding a web site that does nothing but render words into things of striking beauty is a real pleasure for me!

Just to give you an example, here is a word cloud - courtesy of http://www.wordle.net - using the text of this blog post!

Check it out!

Research Blog : words, websites

Word Clouds as Works of Art