Tagxedo Word Clouds

Last week I talked up ‘Worlde‘ as a great tool for creating word clouds. Well, Tagxedo is described as ‘Wordle on steroids’  Much more customisation and flexibility as well as the much needed ‘export as image’ function. Below is what the first chapter of Jane Austen’s Emma looks like as a word cloud where the most important words are biggest. Miss, Mr, Emma; that’ about sums it up!

AustenBook

Don’t be afraid of social networking in English; embrace it.  My class enjoyed reading the ‘facebook’ status updates from Pride and Prejudice below and we’re going to create our own for Emma. Thinking about how a  novel might be deconstructed in this way helps students think about sequencing, key events and how major characters might be thinking at a given  time. There’s also a nice one on Hamlet as well.