Word Up for Wordle.net

Old-school Librarians will recall those dusty reference tomes called concordances.  Such works were handy for providing a list of words used in a body of work, with their immediate contexts and frequencies of occurrence within a particular work or set of works such as one or more Shakespeare plays.

Of course, concordances are generally about as visually appealing as a phonebook (white pages…not that the yellow pages are all that great) and don’t lend a great deal of insight at a glance.  However, many new applications provide visualization with interpretive appeal.

Wordle (Wordle.net) 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.

Word or tag clouds are certainly not a new invention in a Web2.0 world, but this application deserves extra points for the degree of customization that’s provided for the visualization.  Also, you can do a visualization from several sources — from raw text that you copy and paste into a form on the Wordle site, to submitting a URL for a Web page, to submitting a del.icio.us username.

Unfortunately, there’s no direct link (or drill down) between the word cloud and the text that you provide (like a hyperlink between your tags in del.icio.us and the related sites indexed with that tag), but again this is more of a visualization than a true concordance.  However, from marketing your words to gaining a greater introspection to the words in your text, Wordle is worth a look.

One feature, though, that’s particularly lacking with Wordle is a way to save or output the file as something useful such as an image file.  It’s easy enough to print to PDF and there’s lots of options for changing font type, colour scheme, and layout, but ScreenGrab! (an extension for Firefox) didn’t seem to catch anything from the Wordle Web page or the Wordle Java Applet that was opened (just a blank page).  There’s probably some way to grab the image with some screen capture version, but Wordle doesn’t make this feature readily available with the site.

You can save your Wordle visualization to the Gallery on the Wordle site, though, and embed it on your site (such as the one made below on August 6th, 2008 with my del.icio.us bookmarks):