Thursday, November 26, 2009

Many Eyes Visualization of 'King Lear'

The Many Eyes website has in its stable the great Wordle tool, but also plenty of other ways of presenting and 'visualizing' data. This includes text, and we've been experimenting by in-putting the entire text of King Lear. The one below is a 'Word Tree' version of the play: just type in any word, and watch as all references magically 'branch out' (with a count of the number of instances). You can zoom in by clicking the example. This might be particularly useful for key words, such as 'nothing', or 'love'. Teachers could have a bit of useful fun in class, too: ask pupils to predict how important/regular a word is, or have a quickfire 'Who said this?' game.

[note: requires Java Plugin. FAQs here.]

No comments: