Bryan Alexander, whose work on “Storytelling 2.0” I greatly admire and want to blog about soon, commented on how these Wordle word clouds/tag clouds might be used:
I’m wondering about tag clouds for storytelling. They seem like assistive tools.
visualizing a story, to rethink and interpret
writing prompt
What else can we do with these?
Great question! I guess that’s why I run them every week. They seem valuable for something. If nothing else, I like the idea of some sort of visual representation of the weekly content of A Storied Career. Here’s this week’s:
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Part of the time we tell raw things. Our storied experience crafted work into people like storytellers. Stories help people get communities, think better ideas.
I talk myself about Wordle to students in the marketing-management area as a means to see things from a different perspective at a moment where things seem to overwhelm us when auditing an organization. Of course, I advise to be cautious because it's not a fortune-teller !
Word clouds seem like exercises, then. Like regular freewriting, the running of one gets your creative juices flowing.
...what other exercises could one do? What about mashing up two different word clouds from two separate projects, say? or two different people?
Thanks for all these comments (somehow I missed the comments from Stephane and meela till today). Stephane, I'd love to hear more about using Wordle with students, and Bryan, I like the mashup idea.