From TweetClouds to TagCrowds - Another Voluntary Meme

[Update: I added a complete novel you should be able to guess, just to give you an idea of what this would look like (h/t to Adrienne for the spark).]

Going Deeper with Post-Clouds

Since a lot of people seemed to enjoy the TweetClouds as Windows of the Soul meme, I thought this bit of serendipity snagged from some tweeted link might interest you as well. It might even have some classroom use as a reflective tool for student bloggers.

It’s called TagCrowd. In a nutshell, it takes any text and creates a tag cloud based on the text’s word frequency.

I decided to make a Tag Crowd of all posts on this blog for this month of April. I think I’ll make it an end-of-month ritual from now on. It will serve as a visual snapshot of my month’s obsessions. So here’s

April ‘08 on Beyond School*:

–at a glance, I can see this was the month of Ali, Lolita, Project Global Cooling, Diigo, Speech v. Talking, Twitter, and a Debate about Writing. That pretty much sums April up. Kind of cool. (What would REALLY be cool is feeding all posts and comments from an entire blog, but I know of no easy way to generate a text doc from an XML export. Anybody?)

The site suggests more uses - including educational ones - here:

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

as topic summaries for speeches and written works

for visual analysis of survey data

as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world

for data mining a text corpus

for helping writers and students reflect on their work

as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start

as resumes in a single glance

as visual poetry

The list goes on and continues to grow.

Update: Here’s that novel, complete 100-odd pages of text (but see Adrienne’s comment for a better idea).

It’s a voluntary meme, like the last one. No poetry involved.

*FYI: I couldn’t get the embed code to work on WP 2.5, so I just took a screenshot.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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Written by Clay Burell

April 30th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

Posted in blogging, creativity, fluff and fun, meme, writing

Tagged with tagcrowd

5 Responses to 'From TweetClouds to TagCrowds - Another Voluntary Meme'

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Hmm, I’m diggin’ this idea. Wish I had known about it when I was doing word traces with gr.10 in Macbeth. Would be cool to copy / paste all of Act 2 into this little tool, then ask: “What’s really happening in this act?” I’m going to give it a shot with a few different texts. I like the idea of this more than the TweetCloud poetry only b/c this really focuses on a “complete” text. I am thinking of heaps of implications for teaching / learning. That and I’m relatively new to Twitter, so I didn’t think my tweet cloud was an accurate representation (not enough fodder).

[Reply]

Adrienne

30 Apr 08 at 4:55 pm
Hi Adrienne,

I hear you. I just put all of Animal Farm in at once to see what it would look like - but I like your idea of chapter by chapter or act by act better.

I’ll go ahead and update the post with the Orwell tag-cloud just to share.

Have you thought about how it could work with student blogging?

Clay Burells last blog post..From TweetClouds to TagCrowds - Another Voluntary Meme

[Reply]

Clay Burell

30 Apr 08 at 5:24 pm
[...] again to Clay for this cool tool. Here is what Act 2 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth looks like, using [...]

TagCrowd - A Meme and an Idea | Pockets of Change

30 Apr 08 at 6:01 pm
To be honest, students at our school are so far behind the game when it comes to student blogging, I’m not really sure. However, having said that, my 7th graders will be blogging for their next unit and so I am hoping that I’ll have a better answer for you later. (Last year was the first time I had my MS-ers blog; it was a very interesting journey and I’ll be building upon ideas this year.)

Check out what I’ve done with Act 2 of Macbeth over here.

Adriennes last blog post..Are you the 10th person?

[Reply]

Adrienne

30 Apr 08 at 6:05 pm
[...] Net » Blog Archive » Bored of Facebook? on Why I’m deleting my Facebook accountFrom TweetClouds to TagCrowds - Another Voluntary Meme | Beyond School on tagcloud of my phdHot Myspace Layouts on further to the myspace/facebook class debatePassport to [...]

creativity/machine

2 May 08 at 10:37 am