Wordle

This is something I came across when I was working on my Do Lectures I Dent.

Wordle creates 'Word Clouds' from any piece of text that you enter into the dialog box. It takes the most commonly used words from that text and lays them out in various ways. Its a neat little toy. What I like about it is that the user has a lot of control over the way the word cloud is presented. You can change the font, colours and direction of the words so you can get the right kind of vibe from your word cloud.

I found one which was made up of tiles of the lectures from TED and thought it would be fun to use it in a similar way for the Do Lectures. I also thought it would be a good way to visually represent the 'meaning' of the Do Lectures in different ways.

This first one I made using the text from the 'About Do' section of the Do Lectures website.
Its basically what the lectures are all about from the view of the people who run and host them.

For this one I copy and pasted all the descriptions of each lecture from 2009 to make one long paragraph. This gives you a bit of an idea of what the lecturers set out to talk about at the Do Lectures. Common themes can be established from this word cloud I think.

Part of the Do Lectures website is dedicated to the comments of the people attending the next Do Lectures and the reasons they are looking forward to it, what they hope to gain from the experience etc. This cloud is made up of all these comments from those people. Similar to the last one but from the point of view of the audience. Reveals the common themes in the expectations and aspirations for the people in attendance.

At first I thought this would be a helpful tool for research but I did consider using one of them as the basis of my final piece. I thought it would be fun to animate the words and create something similar to a kinetic typography animation. I wanted to make the link between the words that make up the Do Lectures and the words making up the logo in someway while at the same time demonstrating the whole essence of the Do Lectures in just a few seconds.

Although I didn't use a Word Cloud in my final piece, as I didn't feel like it would be entirely my own idea, it did have a lot of influence on what ended up being my final piece.

Thanks Wordle
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