SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE POST
Makeover your tag clouds (Wordle)
I’m hooked on makeovers.
Following my years of careful television study, I now know: v-necks flatter nearly everyone, red shoes go with nearly everything, there are more than hundreds of ways to create the smoky eye.
My interest in makeovers extends far beyond my wardrobe (which, btw, itself extends far beyond my closets, even with Emily and Matthew out on their own).
And so I was delighted to discover I could make and makeover tag clouds using Wordle.
Wordle 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. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
But it won’t do what it’s supposed to do. As far as I can tell, these are not usable tags. You won’t be able to embed these clouds in your blog to help you and your readers find archived posts. (Perhaps Wordle is a 1.0 tool disguised as 2.0.)
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Nevertheless, you will be able to create beautiful clouds in a variety of colors schemes, fonts, layouts, and in a variety of languages. You can limit the number of words displayed.
So what’s the point? I suspect not everyone will think this kind of makeover thing is as much fun as I do.
I am still thinking about this. But I wonder . . .
What about Wordle has to do with learning?
Can we use clouds to study use of language ala Chirag Mehta’s US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud? Mehta notes that his own tool:
shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2007 AD
Can we use it as a media literacy tool with transcripts of commercials or transcripts of campaign speeches and debates?
Can students tag cloud and analyze their written essays and poetry and papers and posts and other docs to get a better sense of how they themselves use our language?
Above are two examples of Wordle tag clouds–one for Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, the other for Poe’s The Raven. Looking at the clouds presents a new way (a kind of pretty and poetic way) to look at language use, a visual concordance.
Here’s a cloud for an article I wrote recently. It occurred to me this would be an interesting alternative to or enhancement of an abstract. Could it be used in conference brochures to help us determine what sessions might be about?
One other easy discovery: I overuse the word amazing. Heck, I am beginning to write like a makeover show!
Any other ideas for this tool?
Note: Be careful using Wordle with the little ones. Clouds in the Wordle gallery include a number of examples that might offend.
Filed under: Uncategorized
About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
ADVERTISEMENT
SLJ Blog Network
Name That LEGO Book Cover! (#52)
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers: A Fall 2024 Preview
Unicorn Boy | Review
A Rover’s Story: STEAM Connections, a guest post by Amy Brownlee
The Classroom Bookshelf is Moving
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT