One bonobo's view of the world...and stuff.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

A thousand words paint a picture

I've been playing with tag clouds at the gorgeous wordle.net. For thems as doesn't know, a Tag Cloud is a visual representation of word frequencies within a body of text. More frequent words are shown larger. Wordle lets you monkey around with layout, colour, etc.

Here's what it makes of Shakespeare's sonnets. All 154 of them:




And here's Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales.' It was a bugger editing out the footnotes from this one. I'm slightly disappointed that 'shiteth' doesn't appear - but bigge shoute out to 'eke':



The Communist Manifesto:




NWA's seminal 'Straight Outta Compton' album:



By way of comparison, I used tagcrowd.com to do Bonoboworld. It doesn't have such nice graphical features:
(Hmm. This could become recursive.)
Any ideas for what else we really ought to see clouded?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about Don Quixote? In the original and in a translation, just to see ;-)

I'd suggest A Clockwork Orange, but it's probably too short.

Edward the Bonobo said...

Go for it!

I'm sure Don Quixote will be available online, though I'm not so sure about 'A Clockwork Orange' (I'd hope 'Moloko' would come up.)

Someone in this household is getting a Kindle for Christmas. Then the fun starts!

Anonymous said...

Done:

The Spanish version,
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2869932/Don_Quijote

The English version,
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2869946/Don_Quixote

I can feel this Wordle device is a jolly thief of time!