Wordle Visualization

I'm gone for a couple days, and it's way too easy to get too far behind too quickly... Ah, the tyranny of blogging...

3 John in Wordle

A post by Jim Darlack on his Old in the New blog brought my attention to the Wordle web site. As the web site says:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

It is FREE, and it works quite quickly even with big chunks of text. (It can't handle Unicode, however. UPDATE: It now does seem to deal with Unicode. Try the BPreplay Bold or Lucida Sans for Greek. SBL Hebrew or Lucida Sans for Hebrew. ) The graphic above shows the NRSV text of 3 John run through Wordle. It does a nice job of visualizing key themes in the text.

Logos does have a built in visualizer and the above graphic shows what it produces for 3 John. (How does one get this graphic? Use the Passage Guide and expand the "Important Words" section.) Not as attractive as Wordle, but you can choose whether to generate the word cloud in English or Greek.