We’ve mentioned Wordle, the engine that turns any stream of text into an artistic tag cloud, a few times in the past. And people have been throwing Shakespeare at it for as long as it’s been around.
But for the geeky among us, C. Laprade over at In The Web Of It went a different way. He put Hamlet in – in all its different forms. Q1, Q2, F1. And then he compared the clouds. Before you look, what would you find more interesting – their similarities, or their differences? Or are they all just slices of the one whole that is Hamlet?
Reminds me a bit a project of my own 🙂UPDATE: I had an idea, and made one of my own for King Lear. Here I took just the lines of spoken text – no stage directions, and no speaking characters’ names. So if somebody said “Hey Cordelia!” that would be included, but her response would just be “What?” rather than “CORDELIA What?” See what I mean? So it gets rid of the syntax that artificially inflates whoever has the most spoken lines.
See anything interesting? I like that “father” and “know” pop out so clearly, and if you look to the left you’ll see “daughter” right there as well.
I made a few of these last year:
http://www.wordle.net/gallery?username=CRShelton
I included the names because I liked the effect. But my favorite one was from the sonnets, which has no names but has an obvious main character 😉