Living with the Truth Stranger than Fiction This Is Not About What You Think Milligan and Murphy Making Sense

Tuesday 22 July 2008

Novel-looking word clouds


One of the sites I frequent is Baroque in Hackney. Our Katy has just got a new book of poems out called Me and the Dead and she thought it might be a good idea to reduce it to a word cloud. Now call me a copycat if you will but I couldn't resist the urge and so here are each of my novels crammed into an artistic rectangle. If you want to join in, the site accepts shorter works too: http://wordle.net/create

If you click on each one then you'll get to see it at a decent resolution.






Living with the Truth




Stranger than Fiction




The More Things Change




Milligan and Murphy


10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for that post - it was a lot of fun to play with various things. . . the first 100 words of a few of my favorite books. . .

Jim Murdoch said...

Thanks for the feedback, Koe, I have to say I wasted far too much time on it myself but it was a fun distraction.

Anonymous said...

These word clouds can be very attractive just to look at. It's also fascinating what they and various 'data mining' applications can reveal about texts and the author's personality.

Dave King said...

Fascinating - well worth being a copycat for! Could stand a bit of investigatimg, perhaps.

SUSAN SONNEN said...

What a fabulous idea! Great artwork to put on the wall, as well. I'm serious!

Jena Isle said...

It's like a garbled "certificate" of all your written articles.

I find it titillating.

Cheers!

Jim Murdoch said...

Adrian, I have to say the thought of being psychoanalysed through a word cloud appeals greatly though I think we'd have more interesting results if I did all my poems. Luckily they're all in individual files.

Dave, just look at the art and smile. There is nothing to investigate.

I think the idea of framing it is great, Susan once I've framed all the other prints I have lying around that need framing.

And, Jena, what a nice way to look at it, a certificate, yeah.

Rachael King said...

These are beautiful Jim. If you don't mind me asking, how did you extract them to put on your blog? I have done one for my first chapter and would love to put it up.

Jim Murdoch said...

Rachael, to be honest I hit Print Screen, pasted the thing into Paint, cut the section I wanted, saved onto my desktop and then imported in the usual way.

If you save the picture into their gallery - which I've not tried - they'll probably provide some code you can paste into Blogger.

Rachael King said...

Thanks Jim - that sounds a bit beyond my talents on a computer, but I'll try another way. Thanks!

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