Saturday, October 9, 2010

Word Clouds

You may be seeing Twitter "word-clouds" in Vancouver's 24 Hours daily newspaper. It's a fairly "new" phenomenon but I had been using the Wordle application for quite awhile now.

Wordle lets you paste large chunks of text, and outputs a customizable word-cloud based on the settings you chose. It normally makes reoccurring words bigger than others. The most creative part is being able to control the word cloud's color scheme, the type of fonts it uses, and its layout (or its randomness).

Words are no longer boring, linear words, they can show patterns, look visually appealing, and can nearly compete with visuals!

Here are a few examples I have found posted by users on Flickr:
day1-2_wordle_Picture 2

FG_7A

Other misc

Wordle of the "About Us" section on the Burnley College Website.

xGW Wordle

Wordcloud for RecSysTEL (paper Drachsler)

ThemaTisch.at Wordle

As you can see, each word cloud has its own unique flavour! Time to grab a chunk of text and make your own. How about a report you wrote?

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