Lazy Sunday

On this lazy Sunday afternoon, I present another pretty word cloud, made possible by Worlde.  I find these word clouds fascinating, and I wanted to see how Hannah Griffitt’s poem, “An Essay on Friendship,” would rearrange itself.  The poem is available on this post, Happy Happy, Joy Joy.  The more frequent the word in the chosen text, the more prominent it will appear in the word cloud.  I wanted to see how often friend and friendship would appear, and what other words, such as soul or dear or hearts, would be large or small.  Check out the results for yourself.

 

[click for a larger image]

This is the word cloud that appeared with the maximum set to 175 words, which is far less than the 1,260 words included in the poem.  The program allows you to set the word maximum, and when I chose 200, the words in the cloud were too small and crowded.  I set the program to erase out common English words (think the, and, of).  


Do me a favor - keep in mind this is not exactly scientific and we’ll be all right.  The biggest word is, unsurprisingly, friend, followed by friendship and love, soul, joys, joy, and ever.  Ev’ry, dear, care, feel, nature, mind, find, grief, tender, known, sweet, and friend share the same font size.  I’ll let you linger over the word cloud to figure out the next set of words connected by font size.  If one were to conduct an analysis of “An Essay on Friendship” based solely on this word cloud, the themes of friendship, love, a connection between souls, tenderness, and grief are still visible and viable.     


I think it would be interesting to give this word cloud to students and ask them to create a poem, or short story, based on the words within (and using the words within).  If I had time, I would try it, but for now, the idea is shelved.  


Now, I’m off to continue my reading of Susan Stabile’s Memory’s Daughters.  Enjoy your Sunday!