http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5886220/The_Cat_in_the_Hat
For my word visualization, I decided to focus on the famous children’s book, The Cat in the Hat, written by Dr. Seuss. Before I copied and pasted the word into the generator, I made a few predictions. I expected that the biggest words would most likely be cat, hat. and fun. I also expected words that rhyme together would be another big contributor to the visualization.
I was quite surprised to find that the word “fish” is the biggest word. Not only is it the largest, but it is also separated from the rest of the group. After re-listening to the book (I listened to it to emulate story time) it turns out that fish is said quite a few times. In fact, the fish was more like the party pooper of the group. He was the one who continually tried to be cautious. He constantly reminded the children of the repercussions that they would face from their mother if she found out some of the shenanigans that the trio were getting in to. Although the book is told from a first person point of view, it is the fish who does a lot of the talking.
Other large words that are the same color include “oh”, “hat”, and “like”. Another interesting thing to not is that “mother” and “house” are quite near to one another in both size and position. Both were probably mentioned roughly the same number of times by the fish out of concern.
Another thing to note is the fact that the word “cat” appears as both “Cat” and “cat” (the difference is that the C is capitalized). This must mean that The Cat in the Hat is referred to both as an animal, and referred to by name. One last thing that I found notable was that Sally has her name mentioned in the picture, but not Conrad. This most likely implies that Conrad is the narrator of the story.
If I could make another distant reading tool, I would choose to have the words scroll across the top of the screen in order. By mousing over a single word, the user could find the definition of the word. By clicking on the word, a web of words would pop up showing the synonyms for the clicked word. Right clicking would resume the scrolling of the words. If the mouse has a scroll wheel, scrolling up will cause the words to move faster, and scrolling down will slow them down. I would also like to include a search function that would show instances of keywords in other works. This would eventually lead you to the next work where those words would begin to scroll across the screen.