I was testing word-cloud-making software this morning.
Wordle
This one seems to get the gist of what’s going on pretty well. Here is the first book of the Aeneid. I left in the common words, but I can look at this word cloud and fairly easily get a sense of what’s going on. If I were writing an article about this book based on the word cloud, I think I’d be able to know fairly quickly what the main themes are. Aeneas, Dido, Venus, goddess, weapons, ships, Troy, Juno, queen, etc. This is the only word cloud software that understands Latin, by the way J
Tagxedo
This one is neat because you can make shapes. However, I don’t feel it’s really great with themes. It doesn’t put the most important words front and center. I think the way Wordle was doing it was giving Capitalized words a heavier weighting. However, it’s got a *lot* of options for customizations. There is also a “pro” version which allows you to do more advanced editing and customization.
TagCrowd
This one is fairly plain and without many options. It really doesn’t give me a good sense of the book at all. It’s heuristic model seems to be “count words,” which seems logical at first, doesn’t really provide a sense of importance to many important words.
This one is fairly plain and without many options. It really doesn’t give me a good sense of the book at all. It’s heuristic model seems to be “count words,” which seems logical at first, doesn’t really provide a sense of importance to many important words.
Many Eyes
This one’s neat because it’s got hundreds of different options, which are actually somewhat overwhelming! You have to register/login to use it. ( For some reason, UC’s mail system put the registration email in my spam folder.) They have a lot of visualization tools, including word clouds, word trees, phrase networks, and social media connections. There are just not as many customization options as the first 2.
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