For those who are interested, my soundtrack for writing this blog was 1000 Oceans (by Tori Amos), sung by the PS22 Kids.
Love it.
This has been around for some time, but I hadn’t used it until this morning. Wordle is a website that takes any text you enter (copypaste), and generates a word cloud from it.
When studying a text, one of the things you do is observation. You sit, observe the text, and note the salient points. Normally this would take a while; Wordle’s great help. To grab an example, I’ll use a book I’m loving right now: Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. I cranked it through Wordle, and here’s the result:
Word Cloud of Ephesians
Well, it’s the Bible, so the most used words aren’t surprising. Here’s what I see:
‘One’
We have one leader, one God, one Father. We all have the same hope, the same faith.
Why divide things?
’May’
Desiring an outcome. Looking forward to see something good coming. Wishing that they might see, and know, and be encouraged.
What a great way to pull the themes out of the passage! It resonated with what I’d picked up when reading it.
For my fellow geeks:
I wrote a quick python script to strip out the verse numbers so they didn’t interfere.
I love py.
I see a big word starting with C.
My question is this: how many sunday talks would have the C word biggest after being put through wordle? (or say… my thoughts?)
hmmmm.
Thanks Paul or Saul or whatever your name is for keeping it real
Shot Dan.
Actually, I think the biggest word was ‘the’, but I checked the “Remove common English words” box.
I was thinking something similar… Though maybe Sunday talks are a different story? What I mean by this is that that they are a face to face talk, and PSaul (silent p, like psalty?) was writing a letter; I’d love to have experienced some of his renowned oratory though
I think if you put the majority of my thoughts through Wordle, you’d definitely need the “remove common English words” to see anything.
i guess i’m inferring they ARE often a different story (to hijack your sentence!). Good reminder on the renowned oratory (2 Cor 10 for anyone interested).
This leads into an important conversation around style/presentation. If Psalty PSaul eschews the (then) contemporary benchmark of skilled oratory in favour of something else, what can we learn from it for our own efforts to live out/tell the story?
What might that ‘something else’ be? And what did that crazy dude say his credentials were again? This goes way beyond style versus content! It reaches through every area of life, every expression of who you are, every decision. Heck, i’ve got a lot to learn. Glad it’s a lifetime thing. Glad it’s a together thing. Thanks for the companionship Dan.