Wordle

by Henry Farrell on July 21, 2008

I’ve seen various textcloud applications before, but “Wordle”:http://wordle.net/ (via “Steve Poole”:http://unspeak.net/) is the first one that I’ve seen that makes it easy to produce aesthetically attractive pictures of the information. Below is the textcloud of my book, “The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation” which I’m preparing for publication in Cambridge’s Comparative Politics series (click on the graphic to see the full thing). I want to make a poster of this and frame it for my office.

More on accents

by Chris Bertram on July 21, 2008

Further to earlier posts on this topic, the BBC website “has a short clip of a voice coach training an Englishman to sound American, together with an accompanying article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7509572.stm . (To my ears his American sounds slightly Irish.) There’s a priceless first comment below the article from a Texan who writes: “It never occurs to us that there is such a thing as an American accent.” Well now you know.