Cloud
Tinderbox 6.4 and Storyspace 3.0 are both out. For a limited time, the all-new Storyspace (which runs on OS X Mavericks and El Capitan) comes with a free preview edition eBook of Getting Started With Hypertext Narrative, with over 200 pages of discussion and writing exercises for fiction and nonfiction.
Tinderbox 6.4 adds word clouds (and lots else). I’ve not been completely happy with the traditional Tinderbox word cloud, so I’ve been playing with new visualizations. Here’s the word cloud for my experimental fiction about Hill Academy after the revolution, which is distantly modeled on The Trojan Women.
Now, I’ve been skeptical of these word clouds for some time; they look good and people like them, but are they useful? But this is an interesting result: the most common word in the story seems to be “know.”
I didn’t know that, and I wouldn’t have guessed. But it’s set in a boarding school where terrible things are happening, a school where nobody knows what the next disaster will be in a country where disaster is only to be expected.