Beyond School

[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.