Discovering new researching methods is always interesting. Especially if it is much simpler than it seemed. I guess most of us have seen images of words sets sorted by relevance of importance but not all of us know how easy it is to produce such a lovely picture. Lovely for people who are in love with words of course. Currently there are a few tools to produce such a thing:
Wordle.
Very simple to use, plain and easy readable layout and, what I am personally very happy about, has huge range od common words lists in many languages.
Voyant-Tools
Again, esy to use, almost guides you to explore advanced settings where you can produce graphs out of whole taxt as well as of choosen pieces only.
Many Eyes
Didn’t get a chance to explore this one, as my lovely university email cracked today and I could not set up account (it is not needed with previous tools). Still think it seems pretty easy to use out of what I can see at other students desktops;)
Textal
Created by Centre for Digital Humanities, friendly looking free app that can be used on most of smartphones. Allows you to create search instantly on you phone based on web resources or books (ebooks stored on you phone I guess). Unfortunately my phone cracked while trying to search ‘feminism’ at guardian.co.uk, and ‘an error occured’ while trying to perform search based on my books.
Wish to enclose screen shots for last two but impossible as could not use it myself. Try to enjoy it yourself!
Just to show you great ideas/ possibilities of this type of programmes I will present very interesting application twitted just a few minutes ago by my friend (also professional librarian) @MagdaSzuflita
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/12/oed-birthday-words/
The app lookups you year of birth and returns words originated in year of your birth. Isn’t it amazing?
Word originated in my year of birth is:
crowd-surfing, n.
Meaning: The action of lying flat while being passed over the heads of members of the audience at a rock concert, typically after jumping into the audience from the stage. Cf. stage-diving n. at stage.
jbabiczdita14 
Wow, your blog’s making me feel old, I remember crowd surfing as a youth (although we used to call it crowd diving, but that’s another story!).
My birth term is
guilt trip, n.
Meaning: An episode of severe, often excessive or unjustified self-reproach, esp. one deliberately provoked by another person; a state of mind in which a person is preoccupied by overriding feelings of guilt. Also: an attempt to instil such feelings in a person. Freq. in to lay a guilt trip on .
I’ll leave it to you to work out what year it’s from!
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