« Wordle »

I forget how I first discovered it, but wordle is one of the hidden treasures of the web.

It's a Java web application which does something very beautiful with a simple idea: paste in a bunch of text, then count the instances of each word, and display a "cloud" of the words used in the text making the words used more often proportionally bigger than those that are rarer.

The result is magical - it pulls themes out of text, making "word clouds" which beautifully capture the ideas in a piece of writing. Wordle's creator Jonathan Feinberg has allowed many options for fonts, colour scheme and layout and allows folks to freely use the resulting pictures for whatever purpose they like.

I've decided to illustrate each post in my blog with a wordle cloud, in the hope it'll help me realise what I'm on about.

I've used it for a few things in the past - professionally as a way of quickly exploring a script for a show I'm working on, socially for making cards for friends.

I've a couple of tips to offer:

- when pasting in a play text, spend a little time in a word processor first removing the character names, as they're likely to occur most often and will swamp the more interesting words from the actual spoken text. You can usually do a "find and replace" on a given character name, replacing it with a space. Stage directions might be trickier to remove but a bit of time culling those means you're seeing only the spoken words in the final word cloud.

- A wordle I made for the NTS workshop show "Bint Jbeil", with the play's title artificially "inflated".

Conversely, if you want to highlight a particular word (either to fudge the results or to give the cloud a prominent "title" you can copy and paste the word many times to ensure it's the biggest in the cloud.

So go and check out the wordle site, make one of your own with whatever chunk of text you've got lying around... There's a huge gallery of public word clouds as well which will give you a sense of the various layout and style options.

It's truly one of the great gifts of the web - sites exist like this which offer something free, unique and inspiring.