Rather than attempt to explain what the software does, here's an example of a word cloud created by Wordle: (the text for this word-cloud was taken from my previous Blog entry on Hot Potatoes).
*On a note related to the last post, this word-cloud took about 3 minutes to load as the website kept insisting that I upgrade to the latest version of java, but i'm not gonna start another rant on that.
So from the information I've gathered, the idea of word clouds is to give a representation of the words used in the text and reflect how often the words are used. One might be inclined to think that this would give a good overview of the context of the text, but in this example we see that this is not true. The blog text is a somewhat scathing review of the software, but the word-cloud brings words such as useful, technology, software, quizzes, appropriate, challenge, and better. This list of words, taken completely out of context, do not reflect the content of the text, but merely the words within.
But this isn't going to be another scathing review of a piece of software written in Java, for this one could actually prove useful to me. From the standpoint of an academic, it serves a purpose as a writing tool. Once a report/essay/paper has been written it can be run through a word-cloud generator to see if the same word has been used too many times without need, perhaps leading the writer to reach for a thesaurus more often. Lets see what comes up when I run my MA dissertation through Wordle.
It would appear that I use the words sound and sounds very often and the words piece and scene a large amount of times too (the words figure appears a lot, but since it's an academically referenced document we'll accept that this word will appear a lot anyway). The document describes the making of a work of sonic art, so it's natural that the words sound, piece and scene would appear a lot. But had I used this software when I wrote the paper I may have reworded a few sections where I had overused the word sound.
Another use I would find for this kind of software is based on the fact that the output is pretty. In a previous life I had studied web-design at postgraduate level, so clean but interesting designs are something that appeal to me. I would certainly take an image like this to use as the cover for a handout, or maybe to open a presentation on a heavily discussable topic.
In a teaching sense I can only ponder on ways to force this software into lessons; I can not propose a situation where a word-cloud-generator might be considered invaluable to the lesson, but it would certainly be interesting in some situations. Such a situation might be in the early stages of a class group project where I might have the students write a paragraph describing their thoughts on a subject, and then compiling all of the replies into a word cloud in an effort to draw out the most popular aspects that each students had considered. But I must admit that this feels like a way to force the software into the lesson and doesn't feel like something that would tremendously benefit the learning.
Wordle is not the only word-cloud-generator available for free online; a quick google search led me to an article on Educemic.com where 10 word-cloud-generators are listed. These all perform the same function, but to varying degrees of artistry and efficiency.
To round this post off, here is a final Wordle cloud created using the content of this post:
P.S. Stop making everything using Java.
P.P.S. Dear OSX autocorrect - in this instance wordle is actually a word.
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