I stumbled (through Google Reader’s blog) today upon Wordle.net, a really awesome (free) site that enables you to imput text from any source (including blogs or webpages) and turn it into dynamic word art pictures with changeable fonts, colors, and styles. I experimented with two different texts. The first was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which really is a wonderful piece. (I pulled it from a randomly Googled site.)

Doesn’t it look marvelous? And so inspiring!

Then I experimented using my college senior honors thesis, about the archetype of the female hero in young adult fantasy literature:

Terrific fun, those are! It is important to note that by right-clicking individual words in the Wordle you can delete them (so in MLK Jr’s speech I got rid of a word or two that are no longer PC in 2008), and in my thesis I deleted character names I mention a lot. You can also select an option to delete commonly used words (like “and” etc.) which definitely reduced the cloud size of my Wordles for the better.

Go over to Wordle.net and create your own!