Thanks to Jason for turning me on to Wordle. It’s a simple program designed to take in text, and spit out attractive word clouds.
My MFA Thesis consists of three parts: a book-length collection of poems, an essay on Seamus Heaney, and a bibliography. According to the Wordle website, “If you do not save your Wordle to the gallery, no information leaves your workstation at any time.” So, I felt comfortable pasting the culmination of two years of hard work in to the site.
First, the essay:
Then, the poems:
As you can see, even though I generated them with different coloring, the word clouds still have a unique impact based on the words alone. Whereas the essay is dominated by a few words, my poems are swarming with numerous smaller words (i.e. less frequently repeated)–and, of course, “like” reigns supreme over my similes.
Just walking my eyes over the clusters of different-sized words is itself a somewhat poetic experience, akin to the hybrid art of visual poetry. So, there you have it–all the words of my creative thesis (minus the bibliography), de-duped and laid out for your delectation. Hmm… “delectation”… now there’s a word I should use more often!
11 Comments
That’s a very cool program, I’ll have to try it out myself. I’m sure my poems are going to be filled with “and” — I kind of have an and fetish. I think it might be biblical.
Anyway, looking it your word clouds is probably a more interest experience for us than it is for you, having not read your thesis. It’s a fun game to try to figure out what exactly the subject was and what commentary you were making.
Hi Tim,
Yes, do check out the program. I should have mentioned that its default behavior is to filter out common words (and, the, etc.). Apparently “like” is not one of them.
Seems like these words could be fun to use for future writing assignments. Then again, it seems like it is often the words I *don’t* tend to use frequently that get my juices going the most when it comes to such assignments. Maybe I should pick out all the little words and try to fit them into a poem.
Cheers,
Robert
It’s like mind mapping. One of my friend’s has software that makes a mandala out of her poems. I have to squint my eyes to see the words.
Thanks for stopping by, Colleen. Yes, it does remind me of various forms of word art, as well as the classic “mind map” used for brainstorming (sans the connecting lines).
Ooh! I should try this too. You trendsetter!
Just passing along the results of my spending way too much time perusing blogs and social networking sites, when I should be writing.
Almost forgot to point out that I have followed your lead: http://faerye.net/post/my-thesis-as-a-cloud
Fun to see the difference!
I note that’like’ is still a pretty large word on mine
Favorite word of poets and valley girls…:)
How were you able to post your Wordles here? I wanted to post my Wordle to my blog, but the only way I could do it was to print it out and take a photo. Any tips for a non tech person would be appreciated.