Cheerful euphoric word clouds
Cheerful, fontiful, colorful, and mindless. Programs like this iPad app, TagCloud, take the words from any text you give it and jumble them together into a 2 dimensional pile or cloud. Not only is it "garbage in, garbage out", but also mostly "silver and gold in, garbage out". It cost 99 cents, the same as my cup of coffee this morning, and will probably hold my interest for about as long. One can construct much more varied and meaningful word clouds with typography-art apps like TypePlay and TypeDrawing, though of course putting words together consciously takes a lot more effort and time.
At first the texts I tried in TagCloud were a new short poem (by Billy Collins) and quotations from different writers. TagCloud reduced everything quickly to colorful little clouds of gibberish, more or less as advertised. The above nine variations are simply using same set of thesaurus words copied from under the headings of optimism and of pessimism. I haven't figured out why the app alway makes cheerful and euphoric biggest and puts them in the middle. Apparently the program isn't completely random in its word distribution. Probably the biggest difference is made by exactly what text or list of words is fed into the app as to how total the nonsense will be in the resulting word cloud. For lists of words maybe the order matters and how many times the same words appear.
Cheerful euphoric word clouds
Cheerful, fontiful, colorful, and mindless. Programs like this iPad app, TagCloud, take the words from any text you give it and jumble them together into a 2 dimensional pile or cloud. Not only is it "garbage in, garbage out", but also mostly "silver and gold in, garbage out". It cost 99 cents, the same as my cup of coffee this morning, and will probably hold my interest for about as long. One can construct much more varied and meaningful word clouds with typography-art apps like TypePlay and TypeDrawing, though of course putting words together consciously takes a lot more effort and time.
At first the texts I tried in TagCloud were a new short poem (by Billy Collins) and quotations from different writers. TagCloud reduced everything quickly to colorful little clouds of gibberish, more or less as advertised. The above nine variations are simply using same set of thesaurus words copied from under the headings of optimism and of pessimism. I haven't figured out why the app alway makes cheerful and euphoric biggest and puts them in the middle. Apparently the program isn't completely random in its word distribution. Probably the biggest difference is made by exactly what text or list of words is fed into the app as to how total the nonsense will be in the resulting word cloud. For lists of words maybe the order matters and how many times the same words appear.