Word Clouds

by phil on Wednesday Jan 21, 2009 7:12 PM
infographics, mainfeed

Wordle is a pretty neat tool for making tag clouds, or simply, word-frequency graphs.

A friend sent this one, it's based on Obama's Inauguration Speech:

This is one from the Bible:

Another friend of mine suggested, "I'd like to see a wordle of my life. maybe broken down by decade." So I decided to try wordle on my blog. I pretty much speak my mind here, so maybe this will be telling:

That's a graph based on 340,000 words over 6 years on this blog. Some interpretations:

• "like" appears a lot, which makes me think about how much I love similes or comparing things.
• "people" makes me think about how I'm always generalizing patterns to everybody
• it's pretty obvious why "think" is on there.

I also like how you can look at these Wordles and sentences emerge. When I see mine, sentences like, "think man, think" or "just like people know" or "things now really are making, man" come to mind.

Often these word counts seem more exciting to make than they are to actually read. Although, it could be nice to hear a soft cacophony of whispers reading these aloud.