WORDCOUNT

fuck sex granulation love the shit god

WORDCOUNT and its companion QUERYCOUNT are two text-art experiments by Jonathan Harris of Number27. (StÈfan Sinclair pointed this out.) WORDCOUNT uses the Britich National Corpus to present an interactive Flash view of all the words sorted by frequency (thus “The” starts the list of 86800 words.) QUERYCOUNT tracks the words people ask to see in the WORDCOUNT list, not surprisingly starting with “fuck” and “sex”, but followed (when I checked) by “granulation”. (There must be some group repeatedly asking for “granulation” or a bug for that to show up so high.) What does the list of words we look for (quoted at the start of this entry) say about us?

Here is a quote from the “About Wordcount”,

WordCountô is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

The interface is effective aesthetically, though I am not sure it does anything for navigating the words. I wonder if we could create such a tool to interface with word lists from TAPoRware?

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