Introduction to Wordtrees

A wordtree is a map that displays how words are connected within and across many stories. This tutorial talks about bits of text as a "story" but you can make a wordtree out of any text. It can be a single large document, or a group of smaller fragments of text. What matters most is that all of the bits of text be related to each other. Otherwise the map is meaningless.

Your "stories" could be all from the same person. If that person was your friend, then the wordtree would be a map of things that your friend talk about the most. How are they related?

Or you could take many blog posts about the same topic, such as Nelly Ali's blog about street children. In that case, the wordtree would be a map of the topics that relate to the lives of street children:


Or you could load the thousands of globalgiving project descriptions into the map. It would look like this:

This map is interesting because the messy, interwoven words in the center branch out into discrete, non-overlapping categories. Each branch is a separate type of community work, and they don't tend to intersect with each other.

Look at the top of the right column for how to build your own wordtree from the search page.