Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole & Chocolate Cake « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Lisa Spiro posts an interesting analysis:

I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color. (Interestingly, Wordle came up with the perfect visualizations for each text at random: Pierre white type on a black background shaped into, oh, a chess piece or a tombstone, Reveries a brighter, more casual handwritten style, with a shape like a fish or egg.)

Wordle Word Cloud for Pierre

Wordle Reveries Word Cloud

Using these visual representations of the most frequent words in each book enabled me to get a sense of the totality, but then I also drilled down and began comparing the significance of particular words.

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