Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
My new favorite toy is Wordle! I think the first time I saw tag clouds was a few years ago when I started using delicious. But, with Wordle,you can put any bit of text through to see what comes out as the most common. As an academic, I see this as a form of content analysis. But, I'm not sure about how it can be utilized as a meaningful form of data analysis. If I took an interview transcript and ran it through Wordle, I could make a beautiful picture of the content. But, other than frequency (which would be find for a quantitative content analysis) of word use, what else would I learn?
Wired magazine 'Wordled' the speeches from the Democratic and Republican conventions and made some interesting graphics. Would it be a useful exercise to have students 'Wordle' their assignments, thesis, literature reviews, etc.? What might they learn from doing that?