Word Clouds — The Wonderful World of Wordle

[Anna Billings]

Here's a fascinating website: Wordle, a tool for creating "word clouds" from text — visual configurations of your written material that are quite amazing. It's creator, Jonathan Feinberg, says this about the tool (which he calls a "toy"):

"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. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Simply copy some text, go to the site and click the "create" option, paste your text and click "go." After that, you can click "randomize" to try out different configurations or use the color options, and so forth.

Here's how my Winter Solstice blog turned out.

Have fun!

[Ellen Pham]

Has anyone been playing with cloudlet, the new firefox add on? It makes context sensitive tag clouds to your google searches. You can set the cloud for tags or sites... It seems very useful for when you are doing a general search, but don't even know what specifics to add... lots of possibilities and little paths to follow come up in the clouds : ). I am enamored, at least for the moment.

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Anna. In Ulverstone, the brethren have gone online. But Ulverstone Gospel Chapel's a bit long for an URL. They're to be found at:
www.ugchapel.org

[Laura Gibbs]

Ha ha, Anna, that's great. In the world of Latin there are similar perils, where words that are perfectly innocuous in Latin are homonyms with the forbidden English words! The most notorious of all is surely anus - sometimes it means "ring" (which is how we adopted the Latin word into English through medical vocabulary), but it can also mean "old woman" (it's like how in English we have "Polish" the language, and "polish" the verb - totally unrelated, spelled the same, different meanings). So, there are a couple of fables in my new Aesop's fables book which feature an old woman, anus, as the main character. I've had teachers tell me in all seriousness that I cannot do this... but what on earth are we supposed to do otherwise? That's what the Latin word is. ... Still, I appreciate the fact that in the classroom the giggle-factor can be hard to manage with things like this! :-)

[Anna Billings]

Thanks, Or-Tal. Great exercise. I won't attempt the Latin one, Laura. :-)

This reminds me of the potential problems and humorous results of website domain names. Someone sent me this recently:

"Unusual Online Names – when they put them together!

Now be careful, Don't fall out of your chairs over these.

All of these are legitimate companies that didn't spend quite enough t ime to consider how their online name might appear! Look at the Business Names and then look at the difference they came out when put together!

These are not made up, You can check them out yourself!

1. 'Who Represents' is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is: www.whorepresents.com


2. 'Experts Exchange' is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at:
www.expertsexchange.com


3. Looking for a great pen? Look no further
than ' Pen Island '. It can be found at:
www.penisland.net



4. Need a therapist? Try 'Therapist Finder' at: www.therapistfinder.com


5. Then there's the 'Italian Power Generator'
company. Check it out at:
www.powergenitalia.com


6.'IP computer' software, the re's always: www.ip_anywhere.com



7. And the designers at 'Speed of Art'
await you at their wacky Web site:
www.speedofart.com"

[Anna Billings]

Thanks, Ellen. Yes, that's just what I needed. Very helpful, indeed. :-)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Or-Tal, here is the very primitive way I have been trying to do that kind of activity at Quia.com:
Fable 12: Find the Words
Keep us posted on when this tool will become something people can use to create their own games! :-)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Or-Tal, that is a neat game! Am I correct in understanding that it will be a tool where people can put their own texts to generate the game...? I do something more simple, but very similar, with Latin - originally Latin was written with no spaces between the words (that often surprises students!), and because Latin is a language where a lot of meaning is carried by the word ending, being able to recognize word stems and endings is very important, so printing out a text with no spaces and telling students to add the spaces is a VERY productive game. I've done that using the "short answer" quiz option at Quia.com, but that doesn't have a sophisticated scoring mechanism (it's all or nothing), and no timer. A game like this would be very useful!

[Or-Tal Kiriati]

link to the link http://globalgamejam.org/games/zero-punctuation

[Or-Tal Kiriati]

I like it very much!
Look at this game http://globalgamejam.org/games/zero-punctuation
I am proud to say I participated in the global game jam last week, and was a member of the team that created this game.
We thought we could use it to help students learn new texts in literature - poems and such. But at the moment it only plays with this single poem we put in.
It's not as easy as it may seem...

[Ellen Pham]

This is your image set at 400 pixels : )