Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Wordle, with surprising results


This is a word cloud of the content of my blog entries. I'm really surprised by the results. In fact, I hope that this program actually compiled all my blog entries, as opposed to just the recent ones.

According to wordle.net, where I generated this image, "the size of a word in the visualization is proportional to the number of times the word appears in the input text. So, for example, if you type apple banana banana grape grape grape into the create page's text field, you'll see that banana's font size is twice apple's, and grape's font size is 3/2 that of banana's."

Conclusions from wordle:
  • Some of the words I expected: women. I guess I have mentioned Nick Kristof and NYTimes several times.
  • I really talk about marriage and family and kids a lot, even though I want none of these things in the near future (or maybe forever). This is scary. I don't know what it means.
  • I need another word to use instead of "interesting".
Wordle has some flaws. The first is that it tabulates word counts from all texts. It does not count the number of times a certain topics is the main subject of an entry, which would be a much better assessment of the content of my blog. For example, I think this is why the word "nonmarital" is so big in the wordle. I wrote one entry (What Makes a Family, Part Two) about nonmarital births and unwed mothers. I had to repeat these two phrases many times because "nonmarital" was the exact language of the study I was writing about.

Wordle looks great, I'll give you that. It's colorful and fun and visually really cool, but I think the tags on my entries, which are all listed on the right side of the page, do more to summarize the topics I write about more than this little graphic.

Also, idea to wordle my blog was totally stolen from ecomarci.

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