Tuesday 12 March 2013

Tagxedo and Wordle- Splash of colour

This is the first time I have heard of both these two services. I have seen word clouds before but I had no idea how they were created and what purpose do the suit (I'm still a bit vague on that). The instructions were brilliant as usual so it was fun and very easy to play around on both. I guess they are both used as a tool to give more prominence to words that appear in the text more frequently. Also if you copy and paste a whole text written by you into them it gives you an idea of your vocabulary choice and the words you use more frequently. I can see it being very useful for English teachers to highlight keypoints. Also when you are doing a book/chapter review you can see what words/themes are more prominent.
In my opinion there are a couple of disadvantages to this system:
Context- taking words out of context, you can see a word appearing but since you can't see what context it has been used in, it might affect your judgment on that whole thing
Frequency- I don't necessarily agree with frequency being an indicator of importance. But I think human mind is designed to think that way.
As for the difference between the two systems, you get more options in Tagxedo. Wordle is just a simple version of Tagxedo with less options for customising and format savings.
Here are the two I created for my blog on both of these websites:





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