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:

  1. Anonymous23 July 2008 at 02:05

    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. . .

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  2. Jim Murdoch23 July 2008 at 10:03

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

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  3. Anonymous23 July 2008 at 10:57

    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.

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  4. Dave King23 July 2008 at 11:51

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

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  5. SUSAN SONNEN23 July 2008 at 15:45

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

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  6. Jena Isle23 July 2008 at 18:54

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

    I find it titillating.

    Cheers!

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  7. Jim Murdoch23 July 2008 at 20:16

    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.

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  8. Rachael King24 July 2008 at 11:51

    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.

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  9. Jim Murdoch24 July 2008 at 12:32

    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.

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  10. Rachael King25 July 2008 at 00:47

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

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