Sunday, December 21, 2008

A Little Seasonal Nonsense

...or, what I'm doing instead of editing

I've been distracting myself this afternoon with Wordle, a curious application which literally paints a picture with words. Here's one I made earlier:



The size of the word is proportional to its frequency in the text--in this case, The Dog of the North. Click on the image for a larger version.

This was so much fun that I made wordles for all the other novel-length fictions I've written, including the draft of The Last Free City (well, it beats editing it...)






Dragonchaser



The Last Free City



The Zael Inheritance

You probably have to be a bit nerdy to enjoy this. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then 130,000 words can also be worth a picture...

2 comments:

David Isaak said...

Those are very cool!

Nerdy? Us?

Tim Stretton said...

You could just about argue they have a useful literary-critical function in modelling the amount of viewpoint time each character gets. It certainly demonstrates the differing narrative strategies between The Last Free City (many medium-sized names) and Dragonchaser (one huge name).

But really it's just fun, which is a good enough reason to make them...