Tuesday 19 March 2013

Robert Aickman Word Clouds

So, I've been participating in a fabulous group read of The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman - no need to explain to regular readers how much I admire Aickman's stories, I'm sure I've banged on about him often enough...

Anyway, I wanted to do a post about some of the stories in the book, and I've decided to do something a bit different. Because reading Aickman is so subjective I'd hesitate to offer my interpretation of one of his stories as definitive; so (with their permission) I've decided to use other people's words from the group read to create these 'word-clouds' for the title story and for The Trains. The phrases are just ones that struck me from the discussion, be they people's view on what the story meant, or other stories it reminded them of, or whatever. The idea was to get a more impersonal, multi-layered, ambiguous description of each story than if I'd just waffled on myself.

I think the results look quite good, and if there's a positive response I'll probably do a couple more.

The Wine Dark Sea

The Trains

3 comments:

MRCosby said...

These are great. How did you choose which phrase went where? Did you design them yourself?

James Everington said...

I can't take too much credit - used a site called Wordle.

You can't fully arrange the words yourself, but you can change the colours, fonts etc. and also randomise it until you get one you like.

MRCosby said...

OK, that sounds interesting thanks.