The world of Wordle

They copied the text of their theses — each between 80 and 100 pages in length — and pasted the text into wordle.net.

Wordle, created by Jonathan Feinberg of IBM Research, allows users to enter text, the addresses of websites with an RSS feed, or the names of Delicious users to create “word clouds” in which the size of each word displayed is proportional to frequency of that particular word in the text that is entered.

Though word clouds have existed for some time, the uniqueness of Wordle lies in its aesthetic appeal, students said. Wordle users can change the colors or the font styles used in the word clouds they create. They can also alter the layout of the clouds to be vertical or horizontal.

In an interview with IBM titled “Can I have a Wordle with you?” Feinberg said he found word clouds of the past “pretty boring and ... kind of ugly,” adding that his inspiration for Wordle came from a blogger who created “a really simple but very lovely tag cloud that he had made of his own tags from the Delicious social bookmarking engine.”

Princeton seniors said they have used the site both to create word clouds representing their theses and to conduct some aspects of their thesis research.

“It was a wonderful thing to do,” Outhwaite said. “Your entire world collapses more and more into the subject of what you’re writing about” while working on a thesis, she explained.

Outhwaite, who wrote her thesis on perceptual violence as a tactic of theater, was not surprised by the overwhelmingly large size of the word “audience” in the Wordle image of her thesis.

She noted that she had shifted her focus to audiences while writing the thesis and that the Wordle image was a “nice affirmation of something I myself discovered in the process of writing.”

Dhwani Shah ’09 said that, for her, Wordle was useful long before she completed her thesis.

Shah, whose thesis features instances of how certain groups “hijack” collaborative and collective websites, used Wordle to find the most prominent word on President Obama’s Open for Questions website, where Americans can propose and vote on questions to ask the president. Shah found during her first trial run that many top questions focused on the legalization of marijuana, even though polls have shown that the majority of Americans don’t support it.

“[Wordle] instantaneously provides information that can be much harder to understand by looking at text,” Shah said, adding that when she created the Wordle image of the website, the word “marijuana” appeared the largest.

But Feinberg warned against relying on Wordle to understand a text’s meaning.

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“I’d caution people not to read too much into such a crude text analysis, [it’s] a simple word count,” he said in an e-mail, adding that “Wordle was designed primarily as a toy.”

Regardless of Feinberg’s intentions in creating the site, students who use the site said they found the word counts useful for reviewing their papers.

“It’s a lovely sense of accomplishment,” Outhwaite said. “Yes, I did indeed write this many pages on this [topic, and] I was focused [on these words].”

“These are some of my favorite words for me, showing up here,” she noted while looking at the Wordle image of her thesis.