Thanks again to Clay for this cool tool. Here is what Act 2 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth looks like, using TagCrowd:
Thoughts and questions:
- Perhaps a tool like this could be used to help students organize ideas, by finding out what is most or least important?
- Can a text-based cloud like this have any use in a Mathematics classroom? (Mr. H, c’mon I know you’ve got something to add.)
- How could students use this tool for their own blogging? (This is actually Clay’s question, but it certainly deserves some thought so I post it here, too.)
Note: I did create a Stoplist (titled Shakespeare Playscript) to create the above TagCrowd, which eliminated all the characters’ abbreviated names, as well as all the entrances and exits in stage directions.
2 responses so far ↓
One cool thing that could be down with tagclouds and Shakespeare is to do a cloud for each act, and then set up the display to allow the reader to move back and forth within the play’s time to see how the important concepts change. For instance your Act 2 example shows KNOCKING so heavily presumably because of the Porter’s speech, not because it’s an important concept to the play - it would not show up similarly sized for any other act, I bet.
Another option I enjoy enabling in my tagclouds is the “drill down” / filter. Say that the unit of measure is actually a “speech”, for example. Now say somebody clicks “god”, above. Then you go through, selecting only the speeches that contained the word god, and regenerate the cloud.
Man, I wish I had the time to work on stuff like this :)…
http://www.shakespearegeek.com
Thanks for that idea, Duane. So you mean doing a tag cloud for each Act for comparison?
I like the “clickable” option you mention, too. That would definitely make it easier to trace a word, or concept, throughout the text to see how it changes throughout.
Anyone know how we could do that? (I’m a techie, but don’t know how to design that kind of stuff.)
Leave a Comment