A Portrait of A Book

In case you haven’t seen Wordle, which totals up the words in a piece of text…here’s a picture of my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. A pretty good likeness, I think. I like the way humans are overshadowed by the microbes–as in life. (Hat tip: Oliver Morton.)

July 13th, 2008 2:52 PM by Carl Zimmer in Microcosm: The Book | 7 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

7 Responses to “A Portrait of A Book”

1. Ron Says:
July 13th, 2008 at 6:48 pm

I like it. I decided to put Watson and Crick’s paper through the process. It’s in the gallery if you’re interested in taking a look. I used Watson J.D. and Crick F.H.C. as the user-name. I’d love to see a collection of famous papers put through the process.
2. Ron Says:
July 13th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

I guess I should have mentioned that I got the source of the text from:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/coldspring/printit.html
and I left out the citations but did include the figure legend.
3. Steven Says:
July 13th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

Pretty cool.
4. Oliver Says:
July 14th, 2008 at 9:07 am

I still think that, so far, Daniel’s “Origin of Species” is the one to beat.

The one I did of the reviews of Eating the Sun worked out better than those of the book itself, which makes sense, I think, on reflection
5. bioblog » Blog Archive » Wordle IS fun Says:
July 16th, 2008 at 6:40 pm

[...] Hat tip to Genomicron and The Loom. [...]
6. Words in the Clouds | Cosmic Variance Says:
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 am

[...] Everyone is amused by Wordle these days. Plug in (or link to) some text, and it makes quite a nice word cloud, customizable in all sorts of ways. At least Abbas had the modesty to try Hamlet, rather than one of his own pieces. [...]
7. Nerdy word fun « The Oyster’s Garter Says:
July 30th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

[...] 30, 2008 Nerdy word fun Posted by Miriam Goldstein under Self-Referential, Silliness Carl Zimmer posted a excellent online word toy, Wordle. It makes word clouds out of any blog or book, with the [...]

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