Tag Cloud as a Teaching Tool
June 16th, 2008Yesterday I read posts by Alan, Gardner, and D’Arcy on a new web application to generate “prettier” tag clouds called Wordle.
First thought was, “oh, cool. Prettier tag clouds of my del.icio.us feed. I like pretty.”
But this tool can do much more than simply shine up your del.icio.us tag cloud. The really powerful feature here is that you can create a tag cloud from ANY text that you want to drop into it. Suddenly, song lyrics, poems, or news articles can be analyzed in a totally new way. Seeing the words this way allows sparks of different thoughts – it makes new connections.
Here is an example of the tag cloud from one of my favorite U2 songs entered into Wordle:
And here is one I created from the text on the Wikipedia page about a certain “ideology” making the rounds in the edtech sphere these days:
You also have control on how the tags get arranged, the colors, the font style, the number of tags to include and more. Jonathan Feinberg, the creator of Wordle, has also created a site that posts a gallery of the most recent Wordles that others have created. The gallery is an interesting browse as well.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Very cool! I was intrigued by Wordle, but this makes it even more compelling. Is this a new medium for exploring one’s thinking on a subject?
June 16th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Steve,
Can you imagine some of your ECON students loading drafts of their papers into Wordle and analyzing the resulting tag cloud? What about students analyzing each other’s tag clouds? What about a mega tag cloud from EVERYONES paper.
Jerry
June 17th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
No, I haven’t done *Paradise Lost* yet (is there an upper limit on the amount of text it will crunch?), but you and I are on exactly the same page about the uses for this tool. The cloud that results from Wordle is pretty but also visually dynamic in a way that tag clouds usually aren’t. I’m really curious about the visualization algorithm Feinberg has created. Something really, really interesting in terms of computation–and in terms of imagination.
(Glad to see you blogging again, my friend.)
June 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Echoing Jerry, this would be great for a CompLit course, or any sort of self- or peer-reviewed assessment. Anything that gets students (and faculty) thinking about words and writing in different ways…
December 4th, 2008 at 11:18 am
[...] a pretty good summary of about how I’m feeling right now. The next step was to pull a blog post about Wordle from Jerry. Wordle is a tag cloud generator. I didn’t really know how to explain a tag [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 9:56 am
I’m not sure if there’s an upper limit to the amount of text you can crunch, but here’s the Wordle I made using the entire text of Huckleberry Finn:
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1683641/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn
February 19th, 2010 at 9:58 am
And here’s my Wordle of Moby Dick:
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1683594/Moby_Dick