Wordle

Word Cloud is pretty common these days as a countless number of bloggers run their own space on the Internet. Wordle is a visual version of word cloud. I introduced the web page around two years ago to my audience in one of my conference presentations. Since then, it becomes one of my favrorite items to mention in a talk related to corpus and vocabulary.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Interestingly, Jonathan Feiberg, the creator of wordle, was born in the same year as I was (not a big deal though). He loved music and he worked as a musician for a long time. I captured the following from his webpage. Check it out!

I was born in 1967, when computers looked like

.
At the time of this writing, computers mostly look like

, but to me, computers are actually supposed to look like

, so I'm kind of perpetually bewildered.

I found all of these little images by using a web site created and maintained by my employer.

I created the Wordle word-cloud layout algorithms while working on a social bookmarking application at IBM Research, in 2005. I created the “Wordle” web application in 2008. Since that time, hundreds of thousands of people have saved over 4,000,000 word clouds to Wordle's public gallery.

I contributed a chapter about Wordle to the O'Reilly book “Beautiful Visualization”. You can buy the book—all royalties go to Architecture for Humanity—or you can download a copy of the chapter I wrote by clicking on .