Wordle is neat. Very neat.
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 (keep this in mind).
I heard about it this morning and have played around with it just a bit during lunch today. Then it hit me – I wonder what would happen if I put in all of Obama’s June speeches and all of McCain’s June speeches (as posted on their websites)?
The results are *quite* interesting!
Obama:
McCain:
Hmph. What do you think?
[...] Williams has posted wordles of Obama’s and McCain’s speeches. Look for “Israel” in both. Now try to find “Iraq”. Er, [...]
Apart from showing words that appear more frequently in bigger size and arranging all words in a compact but not very clear way, what are the benefits of Wordles again? If I wanted to know which words occur most often in a body of text, wouldn’t be a simple bar graph easier to grok?
Hi Christopher.
You might be right – it might be more simple to use a bar graph as far as comparing exact values, like “make” and “time” in Obama’s – which one really was used more or are they exactly the same?
For me, and perhaps a lot of folks out there, the wordle visual allows a quick overall comparison (not exact) and allows for me to have a sense of how all the words are fitting together.
I would rather see the wordle layout than a graph when something is of personal interest or doesn’t require any other manipulation or explanation of the numbers involved.
I might prefer the graph if I was looking at revenues or some other metric that I needed 100% accuracy not just an overview or ‘feeling’ about the way the results are ranked.
There’s also the issue of having to sort and organize all the text you want to get results from and the creating a graph – wordle was cut and paste… and it’s fun!
Thanks for commenting, have a good evening!
Pretty cool.
I was recently thinking about different ways to visualize concepts. Check out what they are doing on many eyes.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home
I don’t Think I KNOW Barack Obama as the Next President of America will be a Huge Relief to the Whole Wide World after the debacle known as Bush + his Brainwashed Flock!!
Two thumbs up, my friend. Thanks for popping by and commenting.
I just discovered Wordle today. Addictive. Check out some more Obama speeches I did…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25652913@N03/tags/obamawordles/
Hey comrogue – great wordles, thanks for sharing them!