Wordle: Turning Text into Art

We live in a visual world. Pictures are processed 50,000 times faster than works so anytime that words can be replaced or augmented by images, then new insight and deeper meaning can be conveyed.

Wordle is a "word art" tool that analyzes text or websites to produce a visual representation of the content. Wordle analyzes the "important" words and then creates a "word cloud" where the size of the words is determined by the frequency of use. Here is an example of a Wordle graphic that has analyzed the Dr. Z Reflects site.



How Can Wordle be Used?
Wordle is cool, not doubt about it, but what are the practical applications for it? Obviously, Wordle is a tool that can be used to provide an objective analysis of our writing.

• Do we tend to use He more than She?
• Am I using I a great deal as I write about what I believe that I should be doing with my eyes?
  
• What words do successful authors use that makes them so appealing?
  

Let's see what Wordle-using educators have to say:

• Angela Maiers talks about Wordle in the Classroom.
• Maggie Harnew in Oxfordshire, U.K. is madly in love with Wordle. She shares a variety of applications that she has developed. Says that she needs to "justify the time" she spends on Wordle. She is using it to create a series of language arts activities.
• I even found one place where they created a visualization of all of Metallica's lyrics.
• Jonathan Feinberg, developer of Wordle, even writes a Wordle Blog.
  
• Rodd Lucier shared his Top 20 Uses for Wordle in his The Clever Sheep blog.

Here's a Wordle created using the Qur'an:















Do you use Wordle? If so, how? What do you see as prime applications for this tool?

Z

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• The One Wordle I'll Ever Create (evilgeniuschronicles.org)
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• Putting Images in Your Wordle (angelamaiers.com)
• Our Biases? (anamericanstudies.com)

Story Visualization

I was just reading Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to Change the World, when he referred to Garr Reynold's Blog, Zen of Presentation. I had never heard of this blog before but it is filled with Garr's reflections on "issues with professional presentation design." We talk about Visual Literacy in our classes but Garr is living it. He discusses how the media succeed and fail in using visuals to convey their messages. Looks like he has a book called Presentation Zen.

One of his postings that I found exceptionally inspiring was entitled "Beautiful example of the visualization of a story." He discussed the D-PAN (Deaf Performing Artists Network). This is an organization that creates "media designed specifically to serve deaf audiences through the use of American Sign Language (ASL). It would be repetitive to post them here, but Garr has embedded samples of videos the D-PAN created as well as a CNN new report. The message that they "have a dream" is beautiful.

Oh, well . . . I guess I will be repetitive by embedding the "Waiting for the World to Change" Video here.



P.S. I also found Guy's posting The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint This is where Guy says that no PowerPoint should have more than 10 slides, last longer than 20 minutes or use a font less than 30 pt. The first two were incontrovertible, but he got soft on the font rule by saying that you should take the age of oldest person in your audience and divide by 2 to determine your minimum font size. That would mean that I would cause you to use 27.5 fonts. Should be interesting. ;-)