Wordle

Pastor Jessi recently introduced me to an online art form called “Wordle.” (http://wordle.net) The main page’s introduction reads:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

This description is much too simple. Wordle may be considered a “toy” because you can “play” with (tweak) the images it generates, but the power of the “word cloud” image goes far beyond play. It creates a visual representation of the central ideas and focal points of a given body of words.

From time to time, either printed in the bulletin or on the screen for TouchPoint, we will use wordle word-clouds to help you see the key messages and meanings in scripture, stories, and other writings. Above is a wordle word cloud for this article.

© 2010 Todd Jenkins