Digital Tools for the 21st Century

I used the program Voyant to create this specific word cloud for the scripture The Adventure of the Speckled Band.   The word cloud is a very good way at figuring out how many times words are used to create a story.  Pretty fascinating if you think about it; not only can we read a story but see how many times each word was used?

When I was younger, I strictly remember being in class while reading a book attempting to count how many times “the” or “and” were placed within a piece of writing.  Although there was much fascination, little did I know that now we have a much easier way of figuring it out.

With that said, being able to read these word clouds, we can see which words are used the most.   Although, these are very much helpful they are sometimes not that accurate (Harris). Harris stated:  I created a word cloud of Tea Party feelings about Obama, and the two largest words were implausibly “like” and “policy,” mainly because the importuned word “don’t” was automatically excluded (Harris).  Technically, yes word clouds give you a gist of how many times a word is used, but what it does not do correctly is give off what the story is about.

My word cloud, the first few times I did it- the main words that were used were THE and AND. Yes, these words help link a sentence, but how does that even relate to what the story is about? I had to fix it a few times in order for this specific word cloud to make sense.

Lastly, it is actually pretty cool to paste a whole text and for it to turn into what we call a word cloud.  Not only is the shape awesome, but the color is awesome too.  I had my fair share of problems with this specific “word cloud” thing- but once I got the hang of it, I started to copy and paste texts that I have read previously before and liked.  Let me tell you, that was super cool.