A Digital History Wordle

Before learning about what a Wordle was, I had seen this type of image previously in galleries and thought of it as an interesting piece of modern art work. However, I recently found out that this was generated by textual data. Like graphs and charts, a Wordle format is used to display information in an easy accessible way for people to interpret.

I used the aims listed on the 'Digital Histories' homepage of Studynet to construct my first ever Wordle. It was extremely quick and easy to do. What I gathered from this is that words such as 'Historical,' 'Online' and 'Primary' are regularly used. Also for someone who had no knowledge of the content, at first glance they would be able to see what the text was predominantly about.

However, in my opinion there are many flaws which would render this unusable for analysis.

1. The layout may be striking but all the more confusing. There is no methodology in the placement of words.

2. The wordle is pretty to look at but would benefit more from a interactive element like displayed on Gapminder. Rather than showing how something progressed over time, It could demonstrate the usage of common words within the text for example, most common words could move from the cluster into the middle and followed by the wordsless used often with words mentioned once or twice displayed in the smallest font. There are other ways in which that can be shown using movement, nevertheless interaction further engages the person looking at it.
  

3. The words enlarged are of those which that have appeared a number of times. Even though this is useful to some extent, I would rather the most important words or key terms relating to the subject appear larger.

4. If not the size of the words, at least there could be a colour coded system demonstrating both the most important and the most used word. Moreover, a shade of colour depicting a certain word could be used. Instead the Wordle displays colour schemes complementing the variety of layouts.

I still stand by my original concept of a Wordle being more acceptable as a piece of art work.
Consequently, the site from where I created the Wordle stated that, 'The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends,' indicating it as a social and fun activity rather than an analysis of text.