Words

It’s about that time in the semester. You’ve assigned it; they’re fretting over it or ignoring it. The first term paper assignment is on the table (or in the drop-box).

This week’s 2 Minute Tech is about looking at writing, or more specifically, looking at words. You probably have a routine for assessing student writing. Have you thought about looking at a visual representation of writing?

Word clouds: no doubt you’ve seen these colorful visuals scattered on the web, or maybe even in your text book. A word cloud is a visual representation of a body of writing; words are weighted based on frequency in the text.  

This is a word cloud generated from Coe's Mission Statement (found HERE)

Does this visually represent what our mission statement says in words?

Following are three tools for making word clouds:

1. Wordle: word clouds in simple format. Click create, then copy and paste text into the text box. Save to a public gallery or print when complete. No account needed.
2. Tagxedo: self-billed as "Word Clouds with Style". Additional options for stylizing the word cloud and more choices for saving the word cloud (you can save as an image file). No account needed.
3. WordSift: created by Stanford University. Not as "pretty" as Wordle or Tagxedo, but includes more features for analysis. Lists words by how common or rare they are; allows for alphabetical ordering; allows users to click a word and view it in a visual thesaurus; allows words to be grouped by subject areas and color coded. Watch this video lesson for more info. No account needed.

How can you use a word cloud?

Here are a few examples and ideas:

• Read, Write, Web used word clouds to show an analysis and comparison of Obama's Inaugural Speech compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Lincoln's Inaugural Speeches. See it HERE. The New York Times hosts a similar article with ALL inaugural speeches; hold your cursor over a word to get a specific word count. For a slightly different view of presidential speeches via word clouds, look at US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. Use the slider bar to scroll backwards in time to see topics changing through history.
• Copy and paste a discussion forum into a word cloud to coalesce the main ideas 
• Compare/contrast news articles on the same topic from different sources
• "Wordle; or the Gateway Drug to Visual Analysis" this blog post on The Chronicle's ProfHacker blog describes ways students "get" word clouds for visual analysis. 
• Have students generate word clouds of their own papers as additional means of self-analysis
• Frightening or exciting: what would your student evaluation comments look like in a word cloud?

Have you tried a word cloud? What's your idea?