http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5901658/Fire_Story
I decided to create a Wordle of the story I wrote for our week two homework assignments. This Wordle represents the story well. The largest words that appear on the Wordle are Fire, Suit, and Laura. These words accurately represent the main focus of the story which was about a girl named Laura and a fire suit.
The next largest words are started, observation, chamber, demonstration, and window. At first glance these words are difficult to interpret but after reading the story it is clear why they are frequent. The story is centered on testing a fire suit in a chamber for a demonstration which is observed through a window. Another word that appears large is bar. This word seems more random and harder to connect to the other large words. I even had to think about the connection for a moment before I remembered how a metal bar was crucial at one point in the story. In this case the Wordle actually revealed the significance of an object in the story that even I, the author, was not fully aware of.
Some of the much smaller words such as crash, smashed, panic, and screaming suggest that the story has some form of action or drama. This is an accurate portrayal of the overall tone of the story because it is very much centered on action and drama. Not all of the small words were this easy to interpret. The small words such as red, members, research, music and cold seem different and cannot be used to make a fast generalization about the story.
An improvement to a distant reading tool I would suggest would be the addition of a time element. If a program, like Wordle, could categorize the most frequently used words with respect to the time in the story, this would add great insight. With this visualization we could easily discover the differences between the beginning, middle, and end of a story.