Khawaga’s posterous

Wordle is a great java app for creating word clouds out of pieces of texts, Atom/RSS feeds and delicious users' tags. As with tag clouds, the sizes of words denotes their frequency in the text. For a very interesting use of Wordle I recommend checking out Lisa Spiro's Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole and Chocolate, where she shows Wordle's potential as a tool for literary criticism.

I took the tool to task by creating a word cloud out of the first chapter of Karl Marx's Capital Vol. 1. After a trial run I changed all occurrences of 'values' and 'forms' into the singular, and 'commodity' and 'coat' into plural before creating the cloud as shown below. It might not come as a surprise that the first chapter is titled Commodities, and that the chapter is all about the what and why of commodities and value and how this relates to labour. Form occurs a lot in the chapter, and Marx uses this word a lot to capture the inherent transformations that occur to the categories (process/relation is a better word to describe dialectical categories as categories are ontologically static and isolated) of value, commodities and labour (all of which are dialectically inner-related). Linen and coats are used throughout the chapter as examples. The important part on commodity fetishism is invisible in the cloud, but then again this is not surprising as the secret of the fetish is revealed in the foregoing analysis of value, commodities and labour.

I just started going through Capital again (it is a book that can't be read, but studied) and I found the word cloud quite helpful as a tool to remind me what that first chapter is all about, and I will most definitively create word clouds out of the subsequent chapters and the entire book.