To the Cloud——Larry Hurtado on Visualizing the Text

Here is another fine post by my friend Larry Hurtado.

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I’ve recently been alerted to software that produces a visual depiction of comparative word/phrase frequencies in texts, a “cloud” visual in which the comparative frequencies are represented by comparative sizes of the words/phrases (probably old news to dedicated bloggers).  Here’s the web site where you can make your own experiments:

http://www.wordle.net/

There is a site where you can see the results applied to the books of the Bible (using an English translation).  The site sells the products, but you can view them free:

http://www.66clouds.com/

My colleague, David Reimer, has produced one for the Hebrew text of the Psalms:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2008/06/24/hebrew-psalms-wordled/

You can produce a “cloud” from any text, however, and using non-Latin alphabets.