Everything you could say about Complexity… in a Wordle.
Sometimes understanding the concept of complexity science can be mind-boggling. Take for instance the definition of complex systems as taken from Wikipedia:
Complex systems is a scientific field which studies the common properties of systems considered complex in nature, society and science. It is also called complex systems theory, complexity science, study of complex systems, sciences of complexity, non-equilibrium physics, and historical physics. The key problems of such systems are difficulties with their formal modeling and simulation. From such perspective, in different research contexts complex systems are defined on the base of their different attributes. At present, the consensus related to one universal definition of complex system does not exist yet.
Besides actually having the word ´complex´ in the definition multiple times, the concept is quite hard to grasp.
Wordle is a toy for generating ¨word clouds¨from text that a user provides. The text can be streamed from a website, blog, speech, or from an inputted text. The application increases the size of the words that are most used. All of the independent words come together to emerge into a visual snapshot.
Considering that this application brings together independent words to create a holistic view of the article being discussed, it was interesting to see how Wordle visualized Innaxis´blog. It´s a way to simplify things in order to get the overall concept.
The end result is interesting. Below is what Wordle produced from the text used in this blog.
In an instant you can see how our view of complexity science involves many different independent topics. Interesting enough, complexity science itself is the study of how many different independent variables emerge to produce a holistic behaviour. With Wordle, the concept of complexity science is a bit easier to grasp when seen in a text cloud.