Jeff for America

Who ever thought words could be so beautiful? Wordle did.

Wordle is an online program that takes any text (a quote, a passage, a blog) and counts the number of times each word is used. Based on those calculations, it changes the text size of words, making the more common words larger and other small. The result is a ‘word cloud’ that can transform a heavy text and makes it readable and somewhat more transparent.

Once you start playing with it, you won’t stop. As a teacher, it’s also a great tool for teaching. I was recently covering the interactions between the colonists and Native Americans, and used a quote from a Wintu tribe woman about how the white colonists were destroying the earth. We plugged the quote into Wordle and this is what we got:

Then we used the strategy of making a word map sentence using the largest to smaller words. Applying that approach, you get “White man (or people) kill trees.” It’s just a simplified version of the more complex analysis we applied before the word map was made. In the end – a great way to look for multiple (or main) themes in a quote or passage.

But beyond teaching, Wordle is just kind of fun. Try it with your thesis, favorite blog, or an article or speech. Just for kicks, here’s a word map from my current RSS feed for Jeff For America.

And if you make word map sentence, you can get: a lot actually happened.

That works.

- Jeff