Sonja Greckol on Wordle

By Sonja Greckol

Word Clouds for Poets

Movers & Shakers:  The major mover in the site is Jonathan Feinberg who works in IBM Research and developed Wordle using work that he'd done for his employer but was permitted to use for this playful purpose. He credits a long list of people: Doug Lea (concurrency utils) and Joshua Bloch (everything he's ever done) who seem to be affiliated with Sun, Martin Wattenberg (throwing stuff at the screen until it fits) and Frank von Ham (hierarchical bounding boxes) both IBMers and Katherine McVety, a visual artist (colour, font) along with a number of others.

Brief History:  The site seems a playful creation of a network of people who do the visual representation of information^. (The best known of these folks is Edward R. Tufte, Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983 and Visual Explanations, 1997 (both Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics. Print.) The site is copyright 2009 and the Forum posts go back to Dec 2008.

Highlights of Venue: Wordle rocks because it allows one to simply insert a favourite text, set the colours, font and primary orientation and opa! You get a “word cloud”—a magical transformation of the words on the page to a burst of colour and typography. Or to put it more prosaically—a graphic representation appears of the words you've selected in colours and fonts that you selected. The cloud demonstrates a hierarchy of frequency: words used most often in the text appear most centrally and largest in the “cloud.”

Of special interest to poets:  Poets will like this site because it yields endless opportunities to daydream and to measure personal word weights and counts visually, a perfect distraction when exasperated by “what comes next.” I'm actually not sure that poets would like it any better than any other word nerd; It's ideal, though, for those moment when only standing on one’s head would jog loose fresh words. Instead, just stand the words themselves on their heads, so best to speak, and see what leaks out!