Revision Activity #2

A set of related sites that I learned about last year on my sabbatical involve taking a text and creating visual depictions of it. (For more information, here is the "Tag Cloud" Wikipedia article.) These sites include:

Tag Cloud -- currently getting an overhaul, apparently.

Wordle

Make Cloud -- to make a Tag Cloud from an RSS feed.

Tag Crowd

and Many Eyes -- which is apparently a kind of user's guide (I'll have to explore this more).

Again, to try things out, I submitted the text from my short non-fiction piece, "Where's the Whistle," to Wordle, which has a nice "Randomize" feature and a print feature, but it does not allow me to embed it to my blog.

Tag Crowd allows for different submissions--web page URL, uploading a file, or copying-and-pasting text--and it also allows for embedding to a blog and sharing on FaceBook, del.icio.us, and Stumble It! Here's my Tag Crowd for my narrative essay:

ball begins behind chris class didn dodge doesn don door eye figure fuck game gets guess hall happened head hear hit instead keep kids latzke ll looks mrs office open pass past person players powers scott secretary sit standing stop supposed team thought throw told voice walks whispers whistle won

created at TagCrowd.com

Again, I would be interested to see if my writing students, when using this, find any inspiration for further writing or revision--or for some sort of digital publishing. By allowing us to visualize word frequency, we might discover that our words are matching our message or that our most frequent words are really not that important. Try it out and let me know how it works for you!