Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Dunn’s Word Cloud

Wordle is an online app that outputs a visual interpretation of certain key words according to the frequency with which they appear in a person’s writing.


Here’s how Wordle interprets the teachings of the American illustrator and teacher Harvey Dunn (1884-1952), himself a student of Howard Pyle. (The writings are actually class notes by one of his students, Charles Andres.)

Dunn speaks of “pictures” more than “paintings,” “spirit” more than “intellect,” “idea” more than “rendering.”

MORE
Video: Meet Harvey Dunn
Try out Wordle.net
More Dunn Quotes at Art and Influence 
(Thanks, Zeitwolf, Charley, and Armand)
Harvey Dunn at Lines and Colors
Harvey Dunn biography on BPIB
Harvey Dunn: Illustrator and Painter of the Pioneer West

10 comments:

Zeitwolf said...

You need to link to wordle.net, not .com ;-) Who is Pyle?

Charley Parker said...

There's a nice series of posts of Dunn quotes on Armand Cabrera's Art and Influence.

Colin said...

If you look above the center, to the right, you see the words "paint" and "Paint" shown. I think the program differentiates between capital and lowercase. I think those two combined would have been a much larger word. No substitute for human eyes (yet).

--Colin

James Gurney said...

Zeitwolf, thanks, I fixed the link. Pyle is Howard Pyle, the great American illustrator who taught Dunn and N.C. Wyeth.

Charley, thanks, I added a link to the great material that both you and Armand have done on Dunn.

Colin, yes, I think that's sort of a bug in the app. They should filter out plurals, gerunds, and capitalizations.

Gary said...

Its interesting to note what isn't said at all or very little.

emotion
feeling
expression

Seems to me to be one of the most critical things for great art, yet it seems to have no importance to his teaching.
Interesting....

Leland Purvis said...

I love the 'In The Classroom' notes at the back of the new Walt Reed book. But I haven't seen the Charles Andres notes and can't find them online. Do you have a source for that, James? Can you give us a link or post a PDF?

kev ferrara said...

Funnily enough, Dunn said this in his lecture notes:

A man once told me to use words like “love,” “heart” and “soul” every day, because you can’t use those words without continually striving to approach what they mean.

Seems Dunn was way ahead of the curve on the whole word cloud thing. And clearly what he strove for most in his lectures, in looking at his word cloud, was "Picture Ideas!"

J. R. Stremikis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
J. R. Stremikis said...

@Colin & @Jim --
The program does differentiate U&lc. I call this a feature, not a bug.
There is more to the Wordle tool, under your control.
After a word cloud is generated, it's then that you'll find a menu at the top of that window. --> File, Language, Font, Layout, Colour -- e.g., under Language, you may wish to leave words as spelled, make all words UC, lc, etc. Other tools allow for removing numbers, common words, showing word counts.
.
I've just made a "Gurney Journey Word Cloud" from this blog's URL, combining U&lc words. Wish I could post it here, but don't know how. Anyway...
.
Lots of fun, these Word Cloud tools - it's not just Wordle. So, check out some others if you like to "paint with words," or are otherwise interested in rhetoric or are otherwise interested in someone's "text/word palette," for example.
Jim has his own "palette," as you may well imagine.

http://redmondlibrary.blogspot.com/2011/06/word-play-with-word-clouds-redmond.html

fascinating -- and somehow parallels the kind of analyses that Jim is fond of doing here, but in another realm...

James Gurney said...

Thanks for the clarification, Stremikis.

Leland, I'm not sure where those notes can be found on the web. Someone sent me the files.

Kevin, you came up with the most relevant quote! Thanks.