Clippings:5.26.09

The New York Times says the economic downturn is putting new stress on libraries.

Class sets of the comic book, "Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli #1" are available for pre-order.

Writing on the I.N.K. blog, children's writer David Elliott calls into question the line between fiction and nonfiction in this amusing memoir.

At the MacMillan Dictionary Blog, Gwyenth Fox says maybe we should just do away with apostrophes.

The English Business Letter Generator exemplifies the Internet's capacity for automation.

And David Warlick discusses The 21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act.

(Picture: "Ann Arbor Library: Pittsfield Branch" by jhoweaa - CC.)

Web Resource: A Twist on Word Clouds by NYT

A couple of months ago, we featured Word Clouds as a web resource. These are easy-to-create graphic representations of the main themes in a piece of text.

Take a look at this interactive graphic from The New York Times. It solicits input about how people are feeling about the economy and displays it in a form similar to a word cloud.

This is a pretty amazing tool. It allows you to sort by respondents' employment information and time of entry. And, it is constantly updated, even allowing the viewer to contribute.

Here's another one from the presidential election last fall.

When it comes to teaching literacy, this graphic would be very useful if you are working with adjectives, as all of the responses are of that part of speech. It would also be useful if you are talking about finding the mood or tone of a piece of writing.