Another Wordle tip

November 30th, 2009 · 9 Comments

I made the above Wordle Cloud as part of a global warming vocabulary activity. Students have to match the nouns to make 2-word collocations. So, for example, we have:

Global warming
Ice caps
Climate change
Environmental policy
Etc

But there are two problems:

I wanted the word Greenhouse to appear twice. It forms two collocations: Greenhouse effect and Greenhouse gases. But in the word cloud, it only appears once (although it is twice as big as the others). The same applies to the words Carbon and Ice.
What happened to the word Sea? It forms part of the collocation Sea levels and Wordle has decided to omit it from the cloud.

How to solve these problems

Problem 1: One of the characteristics of word clouds is this: The more frequent a word is in the source text, the bigger it will appear in the cloud. So, in the noun list that I used to make the above word cloud, the big words Greenhouse, Ice and Carbon appear twice:

Last week I showed how to create phrase clouds (click here for posting). The secret all comes down to a little symbol called the tilde, the one that looks like a squiggly hyphen (~). This sign can also be used to prevent repetition of words in a word cloud. So, for example, if you copy and paste the following word list into the Wordle text window, you will see what I mean:

Age
Caps~~~Carbon
Carbon
Change
Climate
Dioxide
Effect
Environmental
Footprint
Fossil
Fuels
Gas
Glacier
Global~~~Greenhouse
Greenhouse
Ice
Levels~~~Ice
Policy
Retreat
Sea
Warming

The result:

The tilde sign (~) can be used to ensure that individual words are repeated in cloud. Thanks to Maribel Boender who left a comment in the last posting. She pointed out that when using this technique, we can use multiple tilde signs (~~~) to increase the distance between words.

In the comments of the last posting David shared a slideshow of Wordle images of jumbled questions (see here). I mentioned that the tilde mark could also be used to avoid repetition of words in those images as well as the ones I made a while back to revise the blue whale sentences (see here).

Problem 2: Wordle will automatically remove common words from the word cloud. Usually, we are considering words such as prepositions, articles, pronouns, etc. But in this case, the program must have decided that Sea is a common word. This is most inconvenient for me.

You will notice that in the second word cloud (above), the word Sea is included. This is because I clicked on the Language tab on the Wordle page and clicked on the Do Not Remove Common Words option:

Tags: Wordle

9 responses so far ↓

1 Maribel // Nov 30, 2009 at 10:50 pm

Thanks Jamie! I noticed that if we click on “Advanced ” (top right menu), we can add question marks (and other marks and symbols) and determine the size of letters with certain number combinations.
For example:

What:50
is:50
his:50
name:50
?:133
I don’t know:50
(notice that the tilde is not necessary here to make a phrase)

Looking forward to reading more of your posts!
Maribel
2 admin // Nov 30, 2009 at 11:12 pm

Maribel - this is really funny.
It’s funny because with that little advanced option that you mention, we can do all of the things that I have posted in the last two postings. We can:

1. Make ‘Phrase clouds”
2. Ensure that all the words we want to appear in the cloud do appear (i.e. are not ommitted like the word ’sea’ in my posting above)
3. Ensure that words appear as many times as we want
4. Ensure that all the words appear the same size

Well done. Perhaps I should have played about with the program a bit more before posting.

Actually, I wonder if the advanced option is a new feature. I didn’t see it before and there was a time when I did give the site a good look over.

Thanks again
Jamie =)
3 Maribel // Dec 1, 2009 at 9:24 am

On the contrary Jamie, if you hadn’t brought up the topic, we wouldn’t have come so far with so many new features! Besides, your ideas about using Wordle to make matching exercises and scrambled sentences (including David’s slideshows) are excellent to add variation to a lesson. So thanks again for your postings!
Maribel
4 admin // Dec 1, 2009 at 9:50 am

Thanks Maribel.

It was a collaborative effort. And thanks Sylvie who showed me the tilde trick in Paris.

This way of using the ‘Advanced’ option is definitely the best, I think. I got this word cloud:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1396627/Climate_change_collocations

… by pasting the text below into the advanced window (at http://www.wordle.net/advanced)

Age:50
Caps:50
Carbon:50
Carbon:50
Change:50
Climate:50
Dioxide:50
Effect:50
Environmental:50
Footprint:50
Fossil:50
Fuels:50
Gas:50
Glacier:50
Global:50
Greenhouse:50
Greenhouse:50
Ice:50
Ice:50
Levels:50
Policy:50
Retreat:50
Sea:50
Warming:50
5 Jeremy // Dec 1, 2009 at 9:59 am

I am a big fan of wordle and have produced word clouds for many of my graded readers. The next stage is, how best to exploit them. Any hot tips anyone?
6 David // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:42 pm

Jaimie,

Thx for the tip and yes, very useful. Especially us ESL / EFL teachers for word ordering / morphology and sentence structure. I’ve been using it for awhile after my first effort (you reviewed).

Cheers,
David
7 Colleen Young // Dec 6, 2009 at 8:47 pm

Thanks so much - from myself and my students.
Refer to http://colleenyoung.wordpress.com/ for my response but more importantly Emily’s.
8 Harriet Corper // Feb 12, 2010 at 9:20 pm

Thanks Colleen for the tip to use worditout. I have used Jamies environment words and made a cloud.
http://worditout.com/word-cloud/804
9 Jen // Jun 29, 2010 at 11:34 pm

You might wish to check out this site: More Than Wordles http://jlwagner.pbworks.com/MoreThanWordles

there is a cheatsheet of helps you might enjoy —
plus some fun ideas to do with Wordles

Enjoy