Concordle

This program was created by Dr. Ladislav Kocbach. The text on the right is my adaptation of his description of his program. Concordle can be opened from the link and QR code below.

bit.ly/maelt_concordle

Word Clouds

Word clouds are popular in presentations, on webpages, used in books, lessons, etc., as attractive assemblies of words. The essential feature of a word cloud is that the more frequent a word is in the input text, the bigger it appears in the cloud. And the cloud in this context is a graphic containing the key words in the text that the user provides. For one thing, this allows you to see what the key words are, which is useful if you are preparing to read a text whose key words you are unfamiliar with. And it can give you some idea of what a text is about.

The best known cloud-maker is Wordle, and while Concordle might not produce word clouds as fancy as Wordle's, it offers some important features of interest to language teachers and students.

Key Feature of Concordle

The key difference between Concordle and other cloud-makers is that every word is clickable. The click generates a list of the contexts (a concordance) in which the clicked-on word appears. This word, the "node", is centre aligned, a format known in corpus studies as Key Word in Context (KWIC). These contexts provide data for a range of linguistic observations, which can be very instructive for teachers and students alike.

Concordle's corpus is the text that you have generated your word cloud from. This differs from most corpora, which are large collections of many texts, typically running to millions of words. In Concordle, you see your key words in the context of the input text only.

About

My motivation for creating Concordle came firstly from Wordle itself and is a little tribute to my friend, Prof. Ralph Jewell of the University of Bergen, who introduced me to his use of concordances in philosophical analysis some 20 years ago. And I have been talking for a long time about how useful JavaScript can be for programming in general, not only for AJAX and Gmail.

The source code for Wordle is not available as it based on proprietary IBM libraries. In contrast, Concordle is based on my learning to program in JavaScript, so the source is not only free, but documented and invites improvements.

If you are going to use Concordle, a little link and a mention of the author would be greatly appreciated. Become friends with Concordle!

Click here for Concordle or use this QR code on your device.