A Talk with IBM’s Jonathan Feinberg about Wordle

Jonathan Fienberg of IBM sits down with Xconomy Boston to discuss a tool he developed with IBM called “Wordle”.  Wordle has gotten alot of press coverage as some large outlets, like the Washington Post, have used it to convey information about Speeches.  But thankfully, Fienberg is skeptical as to whether it’s actually useful:

Calling it a toy was a defensive measure. I don’t want to make any claims for Wordle as a visualization tool that gets you an accurate idea of your text. People write to me and say ‘Wow, I made a Wordle and now I see wasn’t writing about what I thought I was writing about.’ But I feel very resistant to those kinds of analyses.

It’s a fun toy and an interesting idea, but it’s not quite up to par for most scientific uses.

via Weaving Words with Wordle: A Talk with IBM’s Jonathan Feinberg | Xconomy.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.