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10 Classic Speculative-Fiction Works Reinterpreted As Word Clouds
A brainwavez.org Literary Feature
What happens when you take the text from 10 classic pieces of literature and use it to generate word clouds? The short answer is: some hits, some misses, and a few surprises. The longer answer is: rather attractive results (in most cases). The following project started a few days ago as a late-night attempt to keep my brain awake by playing with words and a typography generator but it soon turned into a week-long challenge in which I kept rerunning some of the attempts to see if I could generate a better illustration that more aptly reflected the contents of each novel. Next I pasted all the text of each novel into Wordle, which randomly generates appealing word clouds with the size of each word indicating its relative frequency. Wordle allows you to choose from a large selection of fonts and layout styles. It also has preset colours as well as an option for you to pick your own. I used a combination of both, depending on which novel I was working on and whether there was a suitable palette for it in the application. I kept the default setting of 150 words but I switched off the setting that removes numbers from the listings. I also tried to switch off the setting that removes common English words but it wouldn't let me - perhaps that is for the best. Finally, I reran the random generations using different layout options, occasionally changing the font, though rarely as within the list there was usually one font that represented the novel perfectly. (Occasionally two fonts, which then made the choices far more difficult.) When I was happy, I took a screenshot. The only image that I edited afterwards was the Dracula one, for that subtle point that is beyond the ability of the application to generate itself. I couldn't help myself. Forgive me! As you can see from the results, some were more successful than others but some interesting patterns and highlights also emerged. I'll leave you to find some of your own but two that caught my attention are that the word "one" is a very frequently used in literature, and "death" and "dead" appear almost as often as "Mars" in A Princess Of Mars. ![]() Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1869-1870) By Jules Verne (1828-1905) ![]() Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde (1886) By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ![]() A Princess Of Mars (1912) By Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) ![]() The Time Machine (1895) By HG Wells (1866-1946) ![]() Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1865) By Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) ![]() The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1890) By Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) ![]() Frankenstein (1818) By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) ![]() The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow (1820) By Washington Irving (1783-1859) ![]() Dracula (1897) By Bram Stoker (1847-1912) ![]() The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz (1900) By L Frank Baum (1856-1919) Update: This article has been featured on Neatorama! Thanks everyone! Geekosystem and BuzzFeed have also sent us traffic. Update 2: Douglas Coupland tweeted about the post, which sent a whole new wave of people here from Twitter. Thank you, sir! Wordle: Official Site | Creation Page (Java App)
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