Blargle

Wordle seems to be the new toy for those hip computer people (thanks to Guan for the find). It makes plain text more interesting by plotting it into artistic clouds, coloured and everyfink. Sweet, eh?

The applications for various word-related frippery are many and varied. Guan pointed it to his journal; others have allegedly converted the ESV New Testament into word clouds. The interesting thing is that when you…wordle your text (behold, I am anticipating that ‘Wordle’ will suffer the same fate of ‘Google’ and become verbised), the size of each word reflects its frequency in the source. Ashamedly, this reminded me of the various psychometric instruments which utilise word frequency as an independent variable, and made me think that psychology journals would be so much easier to read if they only used word clouds instead of graphs. You can take the nerd out of the university, but…

Anyhoo, if you weren’t at SNC on Sunday night, you can catch up with what was said by clicking below. Perhaps you could play ‘Spot the Illustration’?