While doing research about data visualization for my book (Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content), I stumbled upon the website Wordle, where you can build “beautiful word clouds.”
According to the site, “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. 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.” Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg of IBM Research.
So, I first experimented by copying a few chapters of my book to see what the visualizations would look like. Out came an amazing new way to present what I had written. Then, I actually copied and pasted all 200+ pages from my book into Wordle. Here are a few of my favorite results:
