"Mirror" Wordle

[deliasherman]

I wish I knew how to imbed this, but I don't.

It's a Word Cloud for Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen.

Note to self: Stop using "like" so much. And why doesn't my heroine's name appear at all? Maybe because it's a first-person narrative?http://www.wordle.net/

Comments

[d_aulnoy]

The sad thing is that I'm going to spend too much time trying to interpret and infer from the cloud ....

[deliasherman]

I've already done that. And have found that musing over Word Clouds is only really useful when you're dealing with short stories. Novels are Just Too Much Information.

It's pretty, though.

[castellucci]

even with Like being the biggest word, I still want to read it. Hello, Pooka.

[ron_drummond]

It's been a while since I played with wordle, but once upon a time there was a way to alter its settings, including the limit on how many words were drawn upon to form the word cloud. I think the default setting is something like 150 words -- which means that no matter how long the text file you feed it may be, wordle only makes a cloud out of the first 150 usable words. So rest assured that your possible overuse of "like" is almost certainly true of only the first 150-odd words of your novel. (Up the word limit to say 5000 words and the cloud looks very different -- and most of the words in it are so tiny they can't even be read. But it sure LOOKS cool!)

I took another look at the site and I'm not seeing a link to settings, so perhaps the owner decided to limit the options.

[deliasherman]

I thought I remembered seeing something like that last time I played this particular game, but my memory being what it isn't, I thought I'd misremebered. Ah, well. Such is life.

[ron_drummond]

Ah, it turns out, sensibly enough, that the various option buttons only appear once you've actually created a cloud but have not yet saved it to the gallery. Open the "Layout" menu on the bar above the cloud and choose "Maximum words..." and change the default setting of 150 to say 5000 or 10000, and wah-lah (assuming you've inserted a suitably large amount of text)! You can also change the color schemes and types of layout etc.

I poured the text of my 940-word essay about being in Harlem on election night and upped the word limit so as to allow the whole essay to feed the cloud, with reasonably pleasing results.

[ron_drummond]

And now with a laugh I notice that in my Harlem Wordle Obama's name, together with the words that Wordle manages to fit into its letters, reads "Family for Obama big, newly lit" (punctuation added). Could be a headline!

[phoebesmum]

I'm sure I managed to embed my Wordles - you know, there are honestly days when I wonder what language I am speaking - but I am damned if I remember how.

I got my characters' names to appear, in bold yet, by cheating and typing them into the text several times over.

[ron_drummond]

I notice the FAQ on the site addresses some embedding issues.

[deliasherman]

Very cool.

And yes, now that I look, I see where they tell you how to do both the embedding and the word-number changing thing. Hmmmmmm.