We are very pleased to announce that Wordle–the world’s most popular word cloud application–is debuting on Many Eyes! The brainchild of computer virtuoso and esteemed colleague Jonathan Feinberg, Wordle launched last month and has taken the Web by storm. Over 100,000 word clouds have been created so far.
Wordle marks a departure from the more analytical visualizations on Many Eyes. Why bring a self-described “toy” to a site for social data analysis? People have reported finding value beyond entertainment in creating these word clouds. Teachers have used Wordles in classrooms as conversation catalysts; others have created them to express their identities, and scholars have used them to visualize the output of statistical explorations of texts.
And Wordle brings serious typographical considerations into a realm where usually the
biggest choice is “serif vs sans-serif.” Part of the appeal of Wordle lies in a number of clever layout and editing capabilities. First off, it breaks the grid of regular tag clouds by treating all white space available (both in-between words and even inside a single word) as fair game for layout. For instance, a small word could end up appearing inside the “O” of a bigger word. Second, it allows words to be written in any given direction: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. Third, there are choices of fonts, layouts, and colors. And, if all this weren’t enough, it also allows the creator to remove any word she doesn’t want to have on the cloud (right-click a word and say “remove”). Pretty sweet!
So come play with Wordle! We hope this toy brings you some pleasure and, perhaps, some new insights.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Hey there guys!
I was hoping Jonathan’s Wordle would be here!
So beautiful and insightful! And the remove feature is awesome! Very helpful for proving points through the visualization and to remove the undetected stopwords!
I’ll be using Wordle for sure in my talks and meetings!
Miss you guys,
Gui
August 6th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
[...] Wordle August 7, 2008 at 1:05 am | In Design, Eye Candy, Literature, Statistics, Webware | Tags: Design, Eye Candy, Literature, Statistics, visualization, Webware With this exciting new tool, anyone can make exciting, visually powerful text visualizations. People like myself, and the folks over at Many Eyes. [...]
August 9th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Hi. i’m an italian student of information design. i’m writing my university thesis about data visualitation. i’d like to know if i can find and try free software/demo to realize a personal data visualitation. if you have interesting news about that, please send me. thank you. your website is really fantastic!!!
August 12th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
[...] Many Eyes recently added Feinberg’s visualization to their slew of other visualization tools. Wordle marks a departure from the more analytical visualizations on Many Eyes. Why bring a self-described “toy†to a site for social data analysis? People have reported finding value beyond entertainment in creating these word clouds. Teachers have used Wordles in classrooms as conversation catalysts; others have created them to express their identities, and scholars have used them to visualize the output of statistical explorations of texts. [...]
August 15th, 2008 at 4:00 am
[...] The other day I happened to come across a nifty new feature on the data sharing site “Many Eyes” called “Wordles”. As you may know from my last post, I’ve already written about Many Eyes before (here and here) as well as another data sharing site, Swivel, here. [...]
September 6th, 2008 at 1:30 am
[...] Many Eyes blog » Blog Archive » Welcoming Wordle to Many Eyes! (tags: infoarch webdev) [...]
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