A “word cloud,” in case ya don’t know, is a visualization of the most frequently used words in a given text. The total number of words are analyzed and then the most common ones are moved to the top of the list. A graphic is created that weights the words by size and color to demonstrate how often they occur.
Some people have gotten downright creative with wordclouds and offer wordcloud generators that let you pick a shape, colors, relative sizes, and more for your wordcloud. I like the Tagxedo website because it lets you do all that, has a ton of eye-pleasing options, and lets you omit words if you want. You can also give it a URL instead of pasting in a bunch of text.
Plus, on Tagxedo if you like the result you can share it on social networks or have it printed on a cup, shirt, or mousepad on Zazzle. (The products are all censored to be G-rated, though — if someone knows how to subvert this, please tell me.)
The image above is a wordcloud generated using the entire 134,000-word manuscript of Mortality Bridge. I omitted “Niko” because it owns the image otherwise (Niko being the protagonist and all like that). I like the color scheme a lot.
I find it interesting that a novel already garnering a reputation for its graphic and visceral intensity doesn’t have much in the way of violence- or profanity-related words in the cloud. In fact, “scream” is the only one I can see here. So I gotta guess it’s not objectionable language but how language is used that hits a nerve.
I find that reassuring.
Just for yucks I separately fed in several novels and looked for patterns — words that cropped up frequently in my work — thinking maybe it’d say something interesting about me. I was surprised to find that the wordclouds are pretty different for each book. The only common word among them (apart from character names and ignored common word such as “and”) was “looked,” which isn’t really surprising. The lack of commonality makes me think that each book has its own context, its own environment, in which different words thrive that contribute to the overall effect each book wants to achieve.
I find that reassuring, too.
There’s something cool about the idea of making framed posters and/or coffee mugs of all my published novels in themed word clouds. I might just do that little thing.