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General:Wordle

From CWRC

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Ingredients 3 Steps 3.1 Example 4 Discussion 4.1 Description 4.2 Advanced Tips 4.3 Who has worked on creating it 4.4 Where to read about it

Introduction

Wordle, created by Jonathan Feinberg at IBM Research, is described as "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide." This online site allows you to upload your own data or input the URL of a website. Wordle generates a word cloud of your source text in which greater prominence is given to words that appear more frequently. You may generate multiple word clouds of the same source text in different colours and fonts using either a "randomize" option or by using the formatting menu to modify language, font, layout, and colour. This is not a robust research tool; however, there are multiple classroom applications at any level of education.

Ingredients

• A URL or some text.

Steps

1. Note first of all that Wordle is a public site, so any data that you post will be visible to the world.
2. Visit <http://www.wordle.net/> to read about Wordle and to create your own.
3. Select “create” to get started and follow the directions.
4. Once you have created a wordle you may modify it using the formatting menu or generate a different wordle of the same text using the “randomize” button. (Note, however, that after clicking the “randomize” button you will not be able to retrieve your previous Wordle unless you’ve saved it to the public gallery.)

Example

The image on this page is a Wordle of the introductory paragraph.

Discussion

Description

Further description of this tool is available here: http://entry.tapor.ca/?id=4

Advanced Tips

1. You may use screen capture to save your Wordle to your local drive for your own uses.
2. Images created by Wordle.net are fall under the Creative Commons license. They may be used anywhere; however, they should be attributed to <http://www.wordle.net>.

Who has worked on creating it

Wordle is a personal project of Jonathan Feinberg at IBM Research. Credits are listed here: <http://www.wordle.net/credits>.

Where to read about it

Clement, T., Plaisant, C. and Vuillemot, R. (November 2008). The Story of One: Humanity scholarship with visualization and text analysis. HCIL Research Report. Available: http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2008-33/2008-33.pdf

Wattenberg, M. and Viegas, F. (2008). “Tag clouds and the case for vernacular visualization.” Interactions, 15.4: 49-52.

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