How to build a wordscape
To make a wordscape, we first enter the word or phrase in a concordancer. This is a program
which searches through a huge collection of text files. We use the files of Project Gutenberg, an
enormous collection of out-of-copyright literature, as well as non-literary documents and news items.
What comes out is many pages, amounting to 1000 lines or more, looking like this:
On the floor, by the arm-chair, lay a dog, a huge tawny mastiff, with body an
he helm. There is no use in keeping a dog and doing your own barking. I am g
he met a Tiger, and then a Wolf and a Dog and an Eagle, and all these, when t
ang erect, as wide awake at once as a dog, and with one warning cry he roused
aid Anne. "He follows me round like a dog, and smiles like a pleased child wh
the people, for they had never seen a dog before. "How far is it to the
't any braver than if it really was a dog. But Emerson is jealous because he
d the larger parcel; and inside was a dog-collar made of solid gold! And a g
Captain Jim deprecatingly. "Nothing a dog'd care for, that is. I reckon he W
's true, they ought not to have had a dog for a nurse." Many a time it was Mr
n about its being a mistake to have a dog for a nurse. "George, Nana is a t
should say: "It all comes of having a dog for a nurse." She decided to roll
, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags it
he earth had been turned up because a dog had been trying to dig up a mole an
sked Felix. "He's been poisoned--or a dog has killed him," answered the Story
l. Marshall's brother Alexander had a dog he set great store by, and when it
with Mrs. Spencer. "I wouldn't give a dog I liked to that Blewett woman," sai
ay she went out to the barn and saw a dog in the yard. The dog had no busines
oney, and Pickles was unable to buy a dog license. "It is very unpleasant,
nurses, and enough medicine to kill a dog. Life may be a vale of tears, all
ut you can't go by looks in jedging a dog. Like meself, he might be a real be
ersation, "Where's that little dog? A dog means a man somewhere about." "H
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The next stage is to go through all the lines, eliminating close duplicates and picking out the most
interesting or zany lines until we come down to fifty or so of the best. We shuffle them into a random
order. If this is being made for a friend, we sometimes introduce a spurious line in their honour.
For our dog-loving friends we might put in on the centre line "There was great relief in the NAME
family when their dog ROVER came home after being missing for three days", for instance. We save the
concordance lines with about 140 characters per line (twice as much as shown above), put them into a
proportional typeface such as Times Roman, and adjust the lines in order to centre the key word.
Finally we select a suitable image to use as a watermark. This might be a silhouette, or a photograph
toned down to reduce contrast. We combine image and text into a word-processing document, and
mount them in a frame. The whole process takes at least a day before we are satisfied, longer in some
cases.
See our Download page for some examples which you can print out for yourself.
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