Wordle is a new free visualization tool that generates “word clouds” for any text provided. While the most immediately obvious use for the tool is to generate visualizations of tag clouds (such as those for del.icio.us), I’ve had quite a bit of fun seeing what happens when you supply Wordle with literary texts — here’s one example:
That particular image corresponds to the top 100 words in Macbeth, after removing stage directions and regularizing spelling. Analyzing the patterns that emerge will be left as an exercise for the reader…
With thanks to Alan Levine and Bryan Alexander, whose respective blog posts steered me to Wordle.