What’s in Your Cloud?
Tools Tagged visualization, word cloud, wordle August 4th, 2008I revisited an old tool today - Wordle. I had forgotten about it and wanted to give it a whirl. Wordle creates word clouds from a variety of sources, including text that you paste in, the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or it can create a del.icio.us word cloud from a user’s tags.
So, I entered my blog’s URL and the result was this word cloud, which can be customized in many different ways (font, color, layout…). In theory, it visually represents tags or keywords larger than others based upon their frequency of use. I have to admit, I was pleased to see how my cloud displayed in many respects. It would be interesting to do this every month or so and see the evolution (or stagnation) of thought. I wonder if it would accurately represent the main idea or thesis of students’ written work.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Hi Steve,
Here is my original cloud from July 5: http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2008/07/05/wordling-away/
And here it is from today (coincidentally exactly 1 month apart): http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/105902/august_five_leading_from_the_heart
The major themes are pretty much the same in both clouds. It could be interesting to plop student’s written work from different points in the year into wordle clouds and see if their words/ideas have changed/progressed.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Thanks for sharing your clouds. I think it would be interesting to even have students “cloud” their writing from initial draft to published version and see if the clouds evolve and crystalize.