Sunday 19 April 2015

Wot's the Blob then?

Turns out that it is really ordinary stuff:
This graphic composite is from three word-clouds created by Wordle.  It is partly that wordle was in my mind because I helped design an invitation to a friend's Vollbringungverherrlichung. I'm sure my German readers will be cringing at that mangling of their ancient tongue - Tribfest is what I mean: you can always say something shorter in English than any European language. What wordle does is take text, any text; count the words; exclude the ?100 most common words [the of to and a in is it you that etc.] in the language; and blurf out the rest sized according to their frequency. The other reason for today's post is that I just lashed up my 900th post, and I though to mark the occasion.  The three graphics summarise the content of [from the top] posts 601-900; 301-600 and 1-300.  If I cared enough, I'd process the data to look for trends but I like that nothing really stands out - year, people and like [my biggies] are 117, 94 and 64 in the list of common English words.So Wordle probably uses a more subtle algorithm than excluding the commonest words.  Stop words is a concept that helps search engines and the like behave efficiently: you might want to exclude the and who but allow fans to find The Who.

I have, it seems, just been murbling on about normal life in my head and skimming stuff off the top of that ferment every morning. You can keep to yourself any thought about the unlikely juxtaposition of 'normal' and 'my head' in the same sentence.

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