When scanning quickly through the article, words such as "job", "employment" and "education" tend to jump off the page due to the article's theme. I collected from the title that the article would discuss the importance, or irrelevance of a paper degree. More specifically the text is presumed to outline the competition and competitiveness of the current job market and the path which one needs to take in order to succeed in a professional field. After processing the wordle I found the most common words tend to be "a", "the", "of" etc. The most common content word however is "education", not to my surprise. When removing the "a"s and "the"s, I was left with the more prominent and relevant terms such as, "Education", "College" and "Job" which appear (11, 10 and 8 times respectively, much ahead of the other terms. Although on the other hand, I was reviewing the list of common words and stumbled across "you" which is used 33 times. Despite "you" being a very common word that doesn't necessarily relate to any given topic, I gathered that the author must be writing about observed experiences rather than first hand. The author seems very insistent on pushing "you" (the reader) into taking action, whether it be in the form of getting an education or not I knew the author was bound to have an insistent tone considering the volume of "you"s used in the text. Then, notice how the author only used "I" 7 times throughout the entire read.
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| Stemwedel's "What's the Point of a College Education?" |
Through my eyes this wordle reflects the importance of education, specifically college when it comes to life and getting a job. Some vivid medium sized words include "particular" and "ability" which tells me the text is going to be case specific and it will stress the importance of becoming good at something "particular", like a "job" after attending "College" based mainly off of "facts" (used 6 times) as opposed to "fun" (used once). From what I see, I would presume the author is in strong favour of post secondary education for the purpose of employment.
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| George Orwell's "1984" |
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In George Orwell's 1984, the most common words are much different. Before reading, I noticed the name "Winston" used several times through the first couple of paragraphs. By reviewing the wordle however, it has been brought to my attention that Winston is the most commonly used word and since it's a name, I can now assume "Winston" will be the main character and he will last longer than the first couple of paragraphs as the plot develops around him. Another phrase that popped out at me several times was, "Big Brother" and "Watching You". Because the wordle shows these as medium-small phrases despite the fact the term is seen often, one will presume that the phrases are used less frequently as the text goes on as a result of the deceiving sample. However, my imagined story was sad, dangerous or lonely as words like "cold", dust", "wind" and "Police" would rapidly appear. On the other hand, if you remove these words you are left with meaningless and confusing terms which have less relevance. Therefore, the importance of these sad and cold phrases is shown to be very strong as without them the reader would most likely become disengaged or confused which highlights the usefulness of adjectives. Building upon text analysis and data visualization, one is able to utilize a wordle to not only do a word count, but to visualize the importance and relevance of each word and how it will tie into other ideas. Though we still emphasize the concept of complete readings as opposed to text analysis becoming a feasible substitute, methods such as wordle become a key factor in quickly gathering a feel for a text before reading. Like illuminating a cave, one would rather be sure of their footing before they step into something they're not familiar with, though the light will not navigate you through the cave, it will still give you an idea of where you stand.
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| Steve Jobs' Commencement Speech 2005 |
In the summer of 2005, Steve Jobs attended the Stanford commencement ceremony in order to deliver a historical speech. Enclosed were parting words of wisdom from one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs upon a bunch of newly educated go getting whipper snappers. Steve mentioned phrases like "college", "Apple" and "life" (the most common) throughout his speech, to no one's surprise. Essentially, a man shows up to give a speech about life, and in this case Wordle agrees. Before reading, I presumed the speech would contain personal anecdotes from Jobs' past and I was proven correct. I tried to remove the words "life" and "college", the two high points of his speech and I'm left with a very dominant "Apple" and "Dropped". Sure, Apple could help us determine the gist of the speech, but when you see "Dropped" and there's no "College" or "Job", the frequent "dropped" makes no sense in relation to the other words. This wordle is an accurate guideline of the speech when left un-touched or edited.
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| Cecil Frances Alexander: Maker of Heaven and Earth |
Before reading the text, it was clear from the title that the poem was going to be religious, and deal with God or the idea of creationism. While briefly browsing the wordle, the theme is clear. If you were to remove any of these popular words, the poem would look to have nothing to do with religion. It is interesting to see words like "Lord" and "Almighty" in such small font when in a poem such as this which makes the reader believe it is possible the author called God "Lord almighty" once or twice, but prefers the term "God". Unfortunately the poem isn't very long so there is only so much text analysis that can be preformed before just quickly reading the actual work which takes no more than 30 seconds. This shows me that wordles may be very useful for longer works, but it's almost worth it to just read a short work to get the gist, so long as you're on the right track.
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Eric Grills' Facebook Wall
When composing a wordle based upon my Facebook wall, I presumed I would see my name, either Eric or Grills used extensively throughout the text. Like thought, Eric and Grills were indeed the most common words with the exception of "Remove". I was surprised to see "remove" as the most common word. From this, I gather Facebook has made it very easy to hide or delete things you don't want others to see, promoting itself as a "safe" form of social networking. I ended up removing "Remove" so I could confirm that my name was the most frequently seen phrase, when I noticed Commented is also a huge one. This tells me that commenting, and people's opinions must be a corner stone of my FaceBook wall, which is true, without comments we have nothing.
This wordle, composed of an Essay I wrote last year on the Climate Change Conference in Denmark. The conference itself is known as a useless convention in which world leaders meet and discuss pretty much nothing until they sign a sheet of paper that makes their Nation slightly more egotistical. My job was to find the truth about the conference. I concluded that the conference is indeed necessary, although I do believe it is very difficult to tell from a wordle. This is because most of the words I would generally use to support or negate the topic would be similar regardless the case in which they were used. Although, notice how I use very few doubting words, such as "false" or "lousy". Mostly all of the larger words are supporting the idea of a conference, such as "Effort", "Help", "Order" and "Global Pact". I tried removing "climate change" and "global warming" from the wordle and was left with a bunch of country's names and random adjectives. Had I scanned the wordle with these words removed, I might have gathered a different interpretation of the text all together, figuring it could be an essay about geography, or great world wars.
 This wordle of the famous song, "Shook Ones Part Two" by the infamous group Mobb Deep is clearly from the rap genre. Judging from words like "ain't", "crooks", "death", "money" and "yo" we can tell the song is going to be about illegal activity. By removing key words such as, "Crooks", "Shook" and "Scared", the selection is still clearly going to be a rap song. I also noticed that the words from the chorus, "you scared to death, scared to look, you shook cause there ain't no such thing as half way crooks" are defiantly the most common because they appear frequently throughout the song. I used Tag Cloud as well as Wordle for this song and I was surprised to see the difference. Wordle in my opinion is much better, I prefer the ability to change the font, text and colours as well as arrangement of text. In Tag Cloud, you must view the selection in standard horizontal text, with some words bolder and bigger than other. I defiantly see how the "word search" like pattern is much easier to look at and have words jump out at you. I also like how there are different font colours so different words stand out better. |
