Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Wordle!

I came across this web application on a random interweb walk. Wordle. Very very fun.
You just give it text (or a website) and it makes a word cloud, with the size of the word proportional to the frequency at which it occurs in the text. And there's tons of options for the layout. I played around and came up with the following clouds:

First is from the text of my last first-author publication (without bibliography):



I think the font and rigid borders, and B&W text conveys the feeling of a publication. Then I gave it a shot and pasted in my entire PhD dissertation, about 150 pages (also without bibliography):




Not to be completely science-fixed, I entered in the text from a dream that I had, which I had written down and later transcribed into the computer.



seems like a really cool way to display dreams. I was able to modify the colors and word-layout format to make it dreamy-like. And finally, the text from my "research plan" that describes my research goals for the next 4-5 years as I look to start my own lab:



Here the font and colors kind of represent creativity and brain-storming that goes into putting something like this together.

1 comment:

E said...

I like the first and the last one... probably just because they have the name of my mum and sister (Aurora) in big letters!

Don't think they know the importance of the protein they share the name with...