Thanks to JPSmythe I have been playing with Wordle, a website that creates graphical representations of documents. Above you can see my paper on star formation in the Rho Ophiuchi region as a Wordle cloud. Below is the same document in the original LaTex format. anyone that knows the joys of LaTex will understand what all those odd words are.
I also wordled the recently influential WMAP paper, which studied the cosmic microwave background in great details:
Hubble’s famous paper on the expansion of the Universe and the nature of red shift:
Then I thought to query the astrophysical papers database for the most cited papers to see what names or keywords came up. The results can be seen here:
I also thought it would be interesting to do the popular Bad Astronomy blog (current RSS feed):
Finally here is the current word cloud for Digg Space:
PS: Can you tell I am a little bored today?
June 24th, 2008 at 1:55 am
@Rob … I was trapped in conference call limbo today waiting for the host to show up and plugged in a few lyrics from various rock groups, the text of a couple of laws, a disertation, and a couple of rants.
Grrrrr … highly distractible ….
Mind you I’m still looking for a “dumbbell” pattern.
June 24th, 2008 at 7:12 am
@Mang there is no particular dumbbell shape, that particular collage is set to orient the words in any direction and to place them roughly alphabetically. Apparently Hubble didn’t use many ‘k’ words.