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Wordle your dissertation

By skookumchick on December 11, 2008.

i-f875c0b07d9b3cb6229668554781b35a-alice.jpgOne of my graduate students reminded my co-instructors and me of a fun internet tool called Wordle which takes text you give it, and makes a graphical representation of the text based on the number of times certain words appear. We used this idea to summarize the course we've just finished on the history and philosophy of engineering education, and then I wanted to keep playing so I made a wordle of my dissertation. The whole thing. Well, except for the references.

It's below the fold. If you want to play along, wordle your dissertation at http://www.wordle.net and share the link with us either from the wordle site or on your own blog. I can't wait to see them!

Here it is, click on it to go to Flickr to make it bigger:

my dissertation, wordled!
Made at www.wordle.net.

Tags
earning that PhD

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Here's mine. Can you guess what it's about?

It was next to impossible for me to remove references and citations without spending hours on this, but I kind of like how it turned out with the references in there. Especially the "et al" part.

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/380062/Dissertation

Well, it's no secret who I am now. :)

I'm quite impressed that I managed to inspire a wordle craze..... Too bad I don't have a dissertation to wordle yet.... Hmmmmm....What could I wordle now?

By said student.... (not verified) on 11 Dec 2008 #permalink

I don't have a dissertation yet but I wordled my recent review paper. It's beautiful! But I'm not posting it here since my specialty is so narrow that I'd give up my pseudonimity pretty quickly. I did print it out and now it grances the cover of my lab notebook. Yay!

Fun! I just found your blog & you've already given me something to play with. No dissertation yet, but here's a paper on how to write undergrad lab reports ... I like how it picks out what's important!
www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/385332/What's_Important_in_a_Paper
and part of an introduction to a research proposal (almost creepy):
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/385336/EYES!
I love the suggestion a couple of comments up about putting these on lab notebooks ...

I can't stop!!!! I'm doing my annual reports for the last few years to see if the big words change any...