word clouds and exegesis

Word Clouds were introduced with the Web 2.0 as a unique and visual way of analyzing the content of a website. It's essentially a visual representation of the most frequently covered topic or words used. It gives you a fresh way of analyzing the major themes of a communication without getting bogged down into the details of thought, based on the assumption that major themes will be talked about the most.

People have used word cloud's to analyze nearly everything, and on occasion it leads to some surprising results. For example:

Obama's Acceptance Speech


The Book of Exodus


The last few posts from EXISTEMI


If you'd like to try making your own Word Cloud, there are two great online services that will do it for you free of charge, with lots of features for tweaking and customizing the look.

TAGXEDO - The latest and most versatile approach to Word Clouding, Tagxedo allows you to analyze a web page, upload a document, or enter in your own text to analyze. It then offers a huge variety of color themes, shapes, and fonts to get the look just right. I used Tagxedo to create the word cloud for Existemi.

WORDLE - The classic word cloud generator, it's been around the longest and is widely used, definitely worth checking out.

Finally, if you're feeling adventurous and/or nerdy, you can research dynamic word clouds that constantly analyze your blog or website, and update the cloud when appropriate. Each word then serves as a link to all of the entries in which that word occurs. But good luck figuring that out, you're on your own!

I'm bringing up the Word Cloud idea today because I think it's an invitation to step out of the box to some degree when it comes to how we read, interpret, and understand the written word. As a good evangelical, I learned the exegetical process of going line by line through a text, looking to see how a thought or argument was developed incrementally/linearly. I learned how to diagram sentences and outline passages.

And then I took Hebrew in college and everything went to pot. Hebrew as a language and as a means of communication is more eastern than western. It's not based in the Greco-Roman philosophies. It's visual, fuzzy, oral, repetitive. It gets sticky for exegesis, and any Rabbi worth his salt would say that's a good thing. :)

Exegesis is an incredible tool, which can produce wonderful, insightful results, but its not a tool for every occasion. It's like a Phillips-head screwdriver or Adobe PhotoShop. What they do, they do great, but they can't do everything. If we're overly dependent on one method of exegesis, we can miss out on something beautiful. Worse still, we can end up somewhere completely outside the intent of the author.

Take a look back at that Word Cloud of Exodus. In about five seconds of looking at the cloud, you can start to get a picture of the overarching themes of the book... you're hit with the centrality of God, and not just any god, the LORD, who for the first time expresses His intimate covenant name to His PEOPLE, and then He uses it all the time with them.

Don't be afraid to step outside of the box (or the text in this case) to take a fresh look at the situation. The big picture, the sideways glance, the squinty eyed, head tilted look and yield fresh and important insights.