I’ve been having fun playing with Wordle. What’s Wordle? In its own words:
“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”
There are a couple of ways to use Wordle. Firstly, you can type in a web address and Wordle will create a cloud of words, emphasising which words are used more frequently, by the size the word appears. The larger the word, the more frequently it’s used on the website. For example, here’s a word cloud I generated for Communicate Jesus (click on image to enlarge):
It’s interesting to compare over time – for example, here’s the cloud that was generated for Communicate Jesus three months ago (again, click on image to enlarge):
You might like to try out Wordle on your church website, and see what kind of cloud is generated. This picture might be helpful in understanding how ‘outsider friendly’ your site is, what takes prominence, and whether the content on your website accurately reflects what you would like to be communicating.
There’s a second way of using Wordle in ministry – to create word clouds of Bible passages. Wordle allows you to type in a slab of text, and it will automatically create a cloud for you. Here’s how:
- Go to the Wordle Create page.
- Type in the text for the passage you are studying. To save time, you can use an online Bible tool, such as Bible Gateway.
- Click ‘Go’, and Wordle will create a word cloud for you. It’s that easy!
For example, here’s the cloud that was generated from the text of Romans 8 (click on the image below to enlarge):
Interesting, isn’t it? You can also play around with the layout, font and colour schemes, and then print or save the image.
I admit, the scales are leaning in favour this being a fun tool, rather than a powerful Bible study resource! But its limited application makes it interesting at the very least, and potentially helpful and insightful, particularly if you’re more of a visual learner and processor.
Can you think of any other applications Wordle might have for ministry?
