I used Wordle to generate a word cloud for my narrative “Kids Down the Stairs 2P.” With the maximum number of words changed to 50, the cloud has certain nouns and verbs bigger than others, which indicates higher frequency of some of the words.
The resulting image looks similar to what I expected. I was aware of the words I used more often while writing, so when the image has “step” as the biggest, it does not surprise me at all. Based on the word cloud, I would say my story emphasizes actions and contains several descriptive words such as “disdainful,” “arrogant” and “relief.” A reader who sees the word cloud before reading my story could get a sense of what the actual story is like due to such words.
I always consider generating word clouds a way to check for repetitiveness. My narrative is only 498-word-long, so I was able to keep track of word frequency. But if one is writing a novel or anything more than 1000 words, he or she might want to use a word cloud to examine the first draft and replace certain words with synonyms accordingly.
Nevertheless, this was my first time using Wordle, and while making the word cloud I learned that I can change the font color and style, as well as the appearance of the entire word cloud. I realized I could reveal more aspects of my story by doing so. For instance, I selected gray as the font color to represent stone steps, and I made the words go “any which way” to symbolize the movement of the characters from one step to another. These minor changes allowed me to tell a portion of my story in the word cloud, which I’ve found interesting.
A word cloud does not contain statistics, however. It is more of a form of art than a tool for scientific calculation. Looking at word clouds, people can only tell certain words have higher frequency but can’t tell what exactly is the frequency. Therefore, if I were to improve Wordle, I would include the number of times each word has appeared in the text, perhaps in the form of a small Arabic numeral placed within the first letter of a word.
Another distant reading tool I would like to create if possible is a story generator. A person pastes the literary text in a box. Then the computer generates a new story by taking out words with high frequency and recomposing them. Such a tool not only helps identify repetitiveness and the main theme, it also reveals possibilities of telling a story differently, like the remixed Disney film clips explaining copyright law.
Extra-credit meme (made with Photoshop):
