Re: Wordle worthwhile to accessify?

I think Jonathan of Wordle is missing the power of his own tool.

It's NOT just placing random words in a picture, but extracting words 
from a text and presenting an informational visualization. It's 
telling the user which words are the most frequently used on a Web 
page or text (because bigger = more frequently used) as well as a 
list of key words.

For instance, I did a Wordle on an educational technology site and 
discovered that the top word used was "students" and that 
"technology" was a 3rd tier word at best. I think that any user would 
be interested in this (in fact I myself wouldn't mind seeing a 
cleaned up text based version of this list).

FYI - I just found an option which shows a pop-up list of the words 
in alphabetical order and the word count.  I think this IS the 
alternative information. I would recommend a simple non-Java link to 
this list (possibly even an option for sorting by frequency). I think 
all users would be interested and would benefit.

I think the "eye candy" part (e.g. colors, fonts, layout) may be 
irrelevant, but definitely not the frequency list.

Elizabeth


>Great points, especially exposing semantics to search engines etc.
>
>I argued point 5 with Jonathan and this proved hard to convince him of. His
>argument was: Wordle is not about trivial activities such as counting or
>words but all about visually representing words - its all about the visual
>eye candy. He then pointed me to a few text analysis tools:
>
>Perhaps these would be more along the lines you're thinking of?
>http://textalyser.net/
>http://www.textanalysis.com/
>http://www.textanalysis.info/
>http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php
>
>One response might be that video on the net is all about the eye candy. The
>audio is important but not nearly as important. People still find value in
>adding captions that help describe the visual content. I caught myself on
>this argument though, how the hell would you "caption" a Wordle and get
>those funky text effects meaningfully described?
>
>-peter
>

-- 
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Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer
Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS
Penn State University
ejp10@psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office)

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Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 16:42:23 UTC