Experimenting with Wordle and the ESV Bible

Wordle is a neat tool for analyzing lengthy portions of text. To get an idea of how useful they are, look at this page that compares the inaugural speeches of all the United States presidents. What’s a wordle? Here’s how they explain it on their site:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

There are lots of ways to make wordles. You can paste text into a big box. You can dump your blog feed into it and see what words you overuse (and which words you forgot you said).

Just for fun, I made wordles of each book of the Bible. Each book took only a few seconds using my handy esv-insert command for Ubiquity. All of my wordles are linked here, but be sure to try this out yourself too.