I used Wordle to make a wordmap of A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arthur Conan Doyle. I chose a chunkfive font and a chilled summer color setup. This was similar to one of the setups that was done as an example in class.
One of the first things that one notices when looking at the wordmap is how prevalent the word “Holmes” is. That probably offers little significance other than the fact that Watson is narrating the story and Holmes is present in every scene. After that one sees that “photograph” pops up often. That offers more insight into the story since the whole plot revolved around retrieving the photograph that Irene Adler had taken from the King.
I found this to be one of my favorite of the Sherlock Holmes stories since it really establish the personality and identity of the character. The story has shown that Holmes has a competitive streak when it comes to solving mysteries, and it wasn’t until Irene Adler emerged that he was ever challenged or beaten. When Sherlock is beaten by Adler, he doesn’t get angry or demoralized, or show any resentment towards her, he simply refers to her respectfully as “The Woman.” The word “woman” is one of great significance to the story at least in the opinion of this blogger, but in the wordmap it is surprisingly small. The reason for the word’s significance is that it offers a deep insight into the protagonist’s personality, but since the word only appears sporadically, the wordmap fails to emphasize it very much.
My opinion of wordmaps is that they are extremely useful in looking for trends in a certain amount of text, and those trends can be well hidden in that text. Wordmaps are a great way to bring them out. They have a limited usefulness, however, as quantity of words doesn’t always reveal significance, but it still a very useful tool.
