Wordle Assignment

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

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Here’s an example from Romeo and Juliet:

Your assignment has two parts: 1) to create an original wordle that functions as a visual representation/analysis for some aspect of the play Macbeth (a theme, a character, imagery, the decline of Macbeth or Lady Macbeth, tracing a word, etc.) and 2) to compose a written deconstruction (explanation) of your idea, your text selection, and your choices for wordle design. See the example.

Here are some resources to get you started:

The wordle construction website

Lots of information about Wordles, including instructional videos

A 6-minute youtube video explaining how to make and save a wordle.

An internet site for text from all Shakespeare works. You can copy and paste text from entire plays, certain scenes, etc. from this site into Wordle. You may want to remove stage directions, scene information, the name of the character speaking, etc. before you paste into Wordle. The best way to do this is copy the desired text and then paste in a word processing program to remove unwanted words, and then paste edited text into Wordle.

Sample wordle & deconstruction:

From an article at

Deconstruction

Because I copied and pasted the text into the Wordle applet, I didn’t have any control over the words

which would appear the most often. However, this is something that could be easily manipulated, as I

could have first gone through and edited out words that I did not want to appear at all. The largest

word is “Powell”, followed closely by “Obama”, “campaign”, and “think”. These words summarize,

succinctly, Powell’s message, as his endorsement was based on his thoughts on the campaign that

Senator Barack Obama had been running for President of the United States (POTUS), which is why the

words “America” and “president” appear so large, as well. Powell also referenced Senator John McCain,

the Republican candidate for POTUS, several times, as many political pundits thought Powell, a

Republican, would endorse his fellow party member. Powell did talk about the negative campaign that

McCain has run, labelling Obama a “Muslim” (thankfully he addressed the ridiculousness of this being a

“bad” thing), “terrorist”, “socialist”, raiser of “taxes”, and someone with a close association with

domestic terrorist “Bill Ayers”. Powell spoke of the “substance” of Obama’s “agenda”, as well as his

inclusive nature.

The font used is “Grilled Cheese”. This seemed appropriate, considering that Powell was being grilled as

to the choice that he made, and the media certainly grilled both presidential candidates throughout the

campaign. The layout of the Wordle is horizontal, but also has a shape which suggests a person ‐

Obama? Powell? McCain? ‐ each man was the focus of the interview at various times. It could also be

interpreted as the nose of a plane, suggestive of Obama about to take off and run the country. I

continuously reset the layout until this pattern was achieved – and the words “America president Powell

campaign Obama think” in a stack, illustrate the main idea of the interview. The colours are “Ghostly”,

which is a lovely name for shades of grey. Powell’s message was indicative of these shades of grey –

there was no “black and white” in his view. He was not going to endorse McCain simply because they

share a party affiliation. He gave a variety of reasons for his choice of Obama, a man who, through his

inclusive speeches, has also indicated that he does not think in terms of black and white, but in shades

of grey, and is determined to unit a country that is deeply divided along partisan lines.