The Wordle World of Words

Have you heard of Wordle? It is a word cloud creator which takes any text you put into the input box, rates the words according to the number of times they appear in the text, and puts all/most of them into a visual grouping. The rating system makes the most common words the largest (you can choose to exclude common English words like conjunctions and article adjectives).

 

For a Learning 2.0 assignment (just in case some of you are not my classmates or teacher and would like further explanation about the impetus for this post), I have been asked to use Wordle to create word clouds of school library related topics.

 

When I saw this assignment, the first thing I thought was (despite the weeks of training about all of the other roles of a school library media teacher) BOOKS. And that led to the question about which of the books in my personal library mention or deal with books in any major form. Major, I mean. Lots of books utilize mini-inception  in which there is a single book or a classroom or whatever, but there are only a few books which have a moment of Major Discovery involving libraries and books.

 

I did not select all of the pertinent books in my library (where I to do so, I would also include Anne of Green Gables and Princess Academy and any number of beautiful, fabulous books that I dearly love) but, alas, it takes me a while to type out passages from books, so I picked the four most obvious books on my shelves and am content to leave the rest of the task to you, my dear readers.

 

Which books did I choose, you may ask? Well, for starters, one novel that deals with books as a major symbol is Robin McKinley's Beauty, which is a lyrical retelling of Beauty and the Beast. For this Wordle cloud, I typed out two passages: Beauty's first encounter with her room, which has hundreds of books, and her discovery of the castle library, which is larger than she can even comprehend because it contains books that have not even been published yet. (Mind. Blown.)

The second book I selected is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It features a young orphan girl in Germany during the Holocaust, and is a beautifully portrayed narrative of the way that the Holocaust affected German (non-Jewish) citizens who did not identify with Hitler's wicked regime. It is a book of beauty, bravery, and danger--and everything revolves around Liesel Meminger, who loves words and books yet recognizes their danger.  The passage for this Wordle cloud is from Liesel's encounter with the Mayor's wife's library.

This next word cloud is from The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. It is a children's book about a highly unusual mouse who cares nothing for mousy ways but strives for higher ideals. This is his first encounter with a book and the written word, and occurs when his siblings are trying to teach him to scurry and to eat books.

And finally, this is from Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee, the story of an orphaned boy named Jeffrey Magee who is searching for a home and family after running away from his uncle and aunt's dysfunctional home. He finds his way to the city of Two Mills, which is sharply divided into black and white. Jeffrey. On his very first day in Two Mills, he bumps into Amanda Beale and her suitcase library, and that is the passage from which this Worldle cloud is taken.