Monday, May 25, 2009

not here word art

So, I wanted to share with you a bit of word art I came up with, courtesy of the Wordle website. I first heard about this website on Twitter, from a tweet put up by Karen Russell, er, um, I mean @KarenRussell, who is a professor of public relations at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the editor of the Journal of Public Relations Research to boot! Her blog, Teaching PR, is an excellent resource for public relations education, and social media as well, I should add.

Anyway, Wordle let's you turn any bit of text into a form of word art. If you like how it looks, you can save it in their gallery, too. And you can go look at other works that have been saved there.

So I took one of my poems from my MySpace poetry blog, one entitled "not here" which happens to be the longest one I've written, and created what I think isn't a half bad piece out of it. Here it is in miniature:


Wordle: not here



Unfortunately, and this is a drawback for this site, they don't let you copy, save, or upload anything to anywhere else, aside from this sort of thumbnail, so to see the piece in all its glory you're going to have to go over there and look at it, kind of like having to go to the museum to see the painting. Anyway, here's where it lives:
<http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/879891/not_here>.

You can also provide it with the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or a del.icio.us user name, to create an image based on the online text. So, what I'm going to do is post what I've written so far, then feed the URL for Blog Time Passing in, create another bit of word art, and add it to this post. Ready? Okay, here goes!

OK, I'm back! And here's the new text art derived from this blog:


Wordle: Blog Time Passing 1



And to see the full size image, head on over to the following address:

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/883626/Blog_Time_Passing_1

It is possible to change the colors, vertical/horizontal orientation, and shape, but in this instance I just let wordle do its thing. This one could be considered the thumbprint of Blog Time Passing, if you ask me.

Is it art? Marshall McLuhan said that art is what you can get away with. Seems to me wordle is getting away with plenty here!

1 comment:

Karen Miller Russell said...

Glad you liked it. :) There is actually a way to post them (though I haven't tried it) -- and lots of cool ways to use them. Here's an example from David Wescott, comparing Obama's graduation addresses at ASU and Notre Dame: http://itsnotalecture.blogspot.com/2009/05/speech-clouds-obama-vs-obama.html