Practical uses for Wordle

The Wordle meme keeps spread to other parts of the journoblogosphere (see here and here), but I should note that it’s not just a neat little navel-gazing exercise. There are practical applications. Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words points to this examination of the two U.S. presidential candidates’ weblogs.

Now, put that in a local context using the words of a local politician, or the college president during remarks to the campus. Now, a nice color graphic in and of itself doesn’t really tell much without context, and that requires some additional reporting, perhaps talking with some experts in speech or political science. From the bit I’ve read, Wordle is not a form of semantic network analysis, which does attempt to locate words near each other based on context. But it’s a useful (and free) tool for specific occasions.

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