Fun with words: Wordle
I’m way behind the crowd here but I’ve just discovered Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/). I’m writing this blog post for all those other folks out there who may also be slightly behind the bandwagon. Even if you haven’t created a Wordle yourself, if you’ve been to a presentation lately, the chances are you may well have come across one. Wordle is a nice little tool written by Jonathan Feinberg, an employee of IBM. You feed Wordle with some words and it will output a lovely looking “word cloud” where the size of the words depends on their frequency in the input. You can then tweak the output in a variety of ways, including:
- Changing the layout of the words – with options such as ‘any which way’, ‘mostly horizontal’ and ‘vertical’
- Changing the font used – Wordle has a nice list of lovely looking fonts
- Changing the colour scheme – either picking one of the pre-defined schemes or inventing your own
- Tweaking settings such as the maximum number of words used and excluding common words from the analysis
There’s a variety of different ways of getting your words into Wordle:
- Good old copy and paste – you can paste your text into a text box
- Atom or RSS feed – you can enter the URL of a blog, blog feed or any web page which has an Atom or RSS feed
- Delicious tags – you can enter the user name of a Delicious account and create a Wordle of the tags for that account.
- Advanced – in the ‘advanced’ section of the tool you can input words with weightings to create a Wordle. This means you could perform your own word analysis and use Wordle to generate the visualisation for you.
Once you’ve generated your perfect Wordle, there’s a variety of ways of saving it:
- You can print it
- You can take a screen grab
- You can publish it in the public Wordle gallery and then link to it
There isn’t any way to save the Wordle to your machine as, say, a jpg. As I use a Mac, I simply clicked the Print… button and then chose to save as a PDF file. When viewed in a PDF reader, it’s easy to resize the Wordle as required.
Wordle is a Java app and therefore you will need to have Java installed and enabled in your browser to use it.
As with all these things, it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re doing and become completely caught up in playing with colours and fonts. At the end of the day, if you’re using it in a presentation, the Wordle should hopefully be highlighting something interesting about the input you’ve given it. All tweaking should hopefully be done with this in mind. Wordles do look lovely though and they’re fun to create, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of fun is there?
My Wordle Efforts
In my dabbling with Wordle, I combined it with my other favourite tool of the moment, Adobe Kuler. I blogged about Kuler recently. I had been playing with making colour schemes from some of my favourite photos but then hadn’t used the colour schemes for anything. I used them as custom palettes for Wordle and they worked rather well. Well, I think they did anyway. You can judge for yourself.
As I stated above, I saved my Wordles by pressing the Print… button and then saving them as PDFs. I’m on a Mac so this is easy to do. If you want to do it on a PC, you’ll need to have a PDF writer installed to do the same thing. To create the image files to put on this page, I did a screen capture of my Wordles using Jing. If you want to see the Wordles as PDFs, click on the Wordle itself.
This Wordle was generated from the RSS feed for the the Distance and E-Learning Unit’s website. Not unsurprisingly, the most prominent word is “e-learning”. “technology” is arguably the next most prominent word but it’s good to see that words like “support” and “student” are up there too.
The Wordle above is from the same source as the previous one. It just shows a different layout of the words. Is it more or less effective than the previous image? I’m not sure.
This Wordle has been created from the Distance and E-Learning Unit’s Delicious account. This is a good way to see what’s most important to us. E-portfolios, resources and copyright stand out here.
This is a Wordle created from my own personal Delicious account. From this, you can get a reasonably good idea of where my interests lie.
Photo credits
All the Wordles on this page were created from http://www.wordle.net/