Poetry also uses words to mean multiple things, to suggest something other than their literal definition that, too, is lost in a word cloud. Poetry is about phrasing, rhythm, meter take the words out of context and those qualities disappear. We’ve also completely destroyed the poem. How about just one of Shakespeare’s sonnets? Even the good use of synonyms defeats a word-cloud algorithm! He approaches them from a variety of points of view, in a variety of settings, and so there’s nothing to appear in a word cloud. The trouble is that when Shakespeare (or any good writer) writes about complex themes like betrayal, responsibility, and the meaning of life, he doesn’t use the words betrayal, responsibility, and the meaning of life to describe them. I’ve removed common words like the and but and the names of the major characters so they don’t dominate, but it still doesn’t tell us much:
Let’s paste in the entire text of Hamlet and see what we get. To make that point, let’s start with a really bad example-a really dreadful use of word clouds. Used that way, word clouds can prompt interesting discussions, but you have to be careful how you use them. It’s often suggested that word clouds can help reluctant students approach a text, or that they can be a “pre-reading” strategy to identify key ideas. Let’s look at some of the things word clouds can and can’t show us about various sorts of text, and how we might use those strengths and weaknesses in teaching. They don’t recognize synonyms, can’t find the antecedent of a pronoun, and don’t know that “write” and “wrote” are two forms of the same verb or that “speeches” is the plural of “speech.” But it’s important to remember that computers can’t read! The algorithms that generate word clouds treat each word individually, completely out of context. And they can be useful in analyzing texts - as part of a pre-reading or post-reading strategy, or in formative stages of writing. I wanted the focus here to be on the content of the cloud, and sometimes formatting can be distracting.)īecause word clouds can be made to look really interesting, and because they appear to show a lot of information in a small space, they’re tempting to use in the classroom. Tagul provides a number of formatting options, including changing fonts and colors and fitting the cloud to any shape you choose, but I didn’t use any of them. (I used Tagul to generate the word clouds in this article. Each has various options for formatting some let you change the shape of the cloud to that of an image you’ve uploaded.
Reddit word cloud generator free#
There are several free tools available on the Web for generating word clouds, including Tagul. For example, here’s a word cloud I generated from the text of this article (click this or any word cloud in this article to see a larger version): Most often, the larger the word, the more frequently it’s used. A word cloud is a graphic representation of a piece of text in which the words are formatted differently depending on how often they appear.
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