I discovered a treasure, this Javascript thingy, called Wordle, by Jonathan Feinberg and I absolutely adore it. Basically, you dump in a whole lot of text and it creates word clouds for you. The more a word is used, the bigger it is.

For example, as a thank-you card cover to all my group members in Global Families, I made wordles of ALL our emails, notes, speeches, presentations, rants, and research about Guatemala and Global Families. The result?

Pretty neat, right? Though I found it really amusing how words like “style”, “money”, “print” and “go” are part of the top 150 words used.

Wordle is commonly used for analyzing political speeches; you can see that in Obama’s Inaugration Speech, he used the words “nation“, “new“, and “America” the most, whereas George Bush’s speech was just barreling with the word “freedom“. Bill Clinton’s speech used “new” and “century” the most – I guess the “century” is fitting – whereas Ronald Regan overused the word “government“.

So I tried using Wordle on other stuff. Pretty interesting results. For example -

The wordle for my absolutely horrendous World Lit essay on Dom Casmurro (by Machado de Assis) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (by Garcia Marquez):

My topic was on the signficance of names in Chronicle and Dom Casmurro, so I guess the humongous “Names” is okay. But I pity the examiner reading my essay.

So I tried blogs next (because blogs rule).

This is Justin’s blog:

I love how “disturbing” is on there. Very fitting.

Laura’s blog, as well:

I adore how “love” and “Archie” are the most common. Very cute 8D

Amy’s:

Lots of “tired” and “just”.

Bonyoung’s wordle:

‘Warren’, ‘history’ and ‘first’ are the winners.

Kerri’s awesome giraffe’s belly:

Karajan! LEAVE! Obsessed! lol :D

Tiphanie’s awesome (but short D8) clog:

My favourite is  ”Michofosho” on the right corner 8D

and lastly, my blog:

My wordle. ‘Astrid’ and ‘IB’ are predictable.  Pretty funny how “ZOMG” is one of the top 150 words.

Well, there you have it! Wordles of all kinds! ^__^