I Wandered Lonely as a Wordle Cloud

I first heard about Wordle about a year ago. I think it was featured on NPR, so I had to check it out. I used to teach and want to teach again, and I'm always on the lookout for ways to appeal to visual learners. And since Shakespeare is one of my favorite writers, I wondered what his speeches might look like in a word cloud. I tried several different monologues, from Hamlet to Romeo to Henry V, but the image I found most arresting was the word cloud of Marc Antony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar (Julius Caesar, III, ii, 73-107).

The words in a Wordle cloud vary in size based on the number of times the individual words appear in the text. Here is a word cloud of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells.”

It is impossible to mistake the driving word of this poem.
So you might think that in a eulogy for Caesar, Caesar’s name would be the biggest in the cloud. However, what we see is this:

Not Caesar’s name but Brutus, who, as we know, was one of the senators who assassinated Julius Caesar. Then we look at the third and fourth most repeated words – honourable and ambitious – and we begin to see that Marc Antony has seized the opportunity of the speech to make some political points.
What I love about the word cloud is the immediate visual impact. As a teacher, I could stand in front of my class and blather on about how this speech isn’t really about Caesar anymore, I could point out the repetition, I could count the words. And would that be an effective teaching method? Not really. But, I could project this word cloud in front of the class and the impact is immediate.
Wordle pictures don’t work for every poem and every speech. However, I can take the concept – a word cloud with the most important words represented by the largest font – and ask students to make their own clouds. Based on the words they choose as the most important, I can assess how well they understand a given text.
Finally, I just have to say, some of these images are really just pretty. I don’t necessarily love Julius Caesar, but I have a copy of the funeral oration cloud hanging up in my office because it looks so darn cool.