To Transform a City in Word Cloud

Several years ago I attended a one-day seminar on the “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward Tufte. Tufte’s work is based on the assumption that all quantitative information can be explained visually. To me his most powerful example is Charles Minard’s 1869 depiction of Napoleon’s march on Moscow. Those who know me, know that I’m a diagram guy and I often think of terms of quadrants and Cartesian coordinates. My business card is a graphed 3X5 card with my name and contact info printed at the top of one side of the card. Over the years I’ve drawn bubble diagrams of the human service community of Boulder, my travel schedule for one year, the ecosystem of family and marriage ministries, etc.  At Github.com there are a fascinating graphics on new ways to display information. One of the best ones is Jason Davies’ Word Cloud, an open source program where you can put in your Website or a sample of your writing to see which words and themes you use most often. So this morning I copied and pasted the entire transcript of To Transform a City: Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole City–a book Sam Williams and I wrote together back in 2010. Actually I was pretty happy with what I found; word like kingdom, community, people, good, Jesus, together, serve, world, others, see, go, tell, life…. I like it!