I was testing word-cloud-making software this morning.
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.
