Word clouds

Last November, Anne Hodgson created "Wordle and wine: Visuals for vocabulary" with the help of a technology called Wordle. By generating clouds of words, Wordle gives us another way of looking at vocabulary. Now there's a new word generator in town and its name is Tagxedo. Wordle creator Jonathan Feinberg, who recently left his job at IBM Research to work at Google Books, says it is not so much an alternative as the next generation of Wordle.

I took three of my favourite Bob Dylan songs — "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", " Blowin' in the Wind" and "Maggie's Farm" — and put them in Tagxedo. Here is what I got. Just click on each image to expand it.

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Blowin' in the Wind

Maggie's Farm

You can use Tagxedo to create word clouds by entering a Web address or by pasting in text. It will size the words according to their frequency in the text, while leaving out small ones like "is", "do" and so on. With just one click, you can rotate the cloud and change its colours and shapes. When you're done, you can save an image of what you have created.

Teachers looking for a new way to get their students working with words might find Tagxedo useful, and anyone learning vocabulary can have great fun with it as well.