bioephemera is art + biology - anything and everything from representations of science in art and literature to the neuroscience of aesthetics. Along with lots of other stuff that's just plain interesting.
I'd never bowdlerize any author's work, but wordlerizing is a lot of fun. Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle is an easy way to create pretty frequency-based word clouds from plain text.
I entered the text of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and this is what I got. No surprise, "species" is the dominant word. But I like the appearance of "will" as a dominant word as well, suggesting the inexorable drive of evolution. . .
I also Wordlerized Watson and Crick's seminal Nature paper, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", and got this pretty vertical column:
In this case, I like how "two" appears so boldly with "pairs" and "Dr" above it. Though the "two" and "pairs" no doubt refer to base pairing, I like the association with Watson and Crick, the dynamic duo of molecular genetics.
Wordle via 3quarksdaily
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Now you just need to arrange Watson & Crick's wordle into a double-helix.
I put my blog in but it looks like it just scans whatever is on the main page. Tyrannosaurus came out as #1, but there were a lot of unexpected words in there, too. I was half expecting "Indeed" to be huge but didn't see it.
Posted by: Laelaps | July 23, 2008 7:48 PM
Yo! BioE!
Tag!!
Posted by: BikeMonkey | July 23, 2008 10:19 PM
Hi Jessica, looks like you have made the same mistake as I did. Jonathan explained it: Wordle's default word number limit is set at 150.
So that's why you get the whole Origin of Species into one small cloud. Also your Watson & Crick paper cloud becomes bigger and more diversified if you set to word number limit higher.
Also try to make a cloud from your blogroll, as I tried -- that could be quite useful.
Posted by: Thomas | July 24, 2008 2:38 AM
"I like how 'two' appears so boldly with 'pairs' and 'Dr' above it."
There's your nom-de-blog, Jessica, "Dr. Two Pairs".
See how much fun you can have with that...!
Posted by: Ian | July 24, 2008 8:21 AM
Simply wonderful! I plan to put Thoreau's "Walking" into it. It could be an interesting idea for art to put on the one wall in my house that needs it (the rest are all windows / doors / fireplace / etc.)
Posted by: Janeen | July 24, 2008 11:19 PM