Randomly generated wordle of most frequent iChat words of 2009. Larger words were more common.

Making a wordle from your iChat logs isn’t an easy thing to do. Over the last year I’ve accumulated a frighteningly large amount of iChat logs. Now, before they are all put out to pasture [well, at least in theory] I wanted to see what the major themes of the year were.

iChat saves logs of conversations in some type of weird text format so I used an application called Logorrhea to export the logs into one text file. The result: a 30.4 MB text file that contained usernames, date stamps and message content. I then imported this data into Excel making a separate column for each of the three data units. Next I deleted the username and date stamp information and exported the message content as another plain text file (5.3 MB). With another application, Word Counter, I counted the frequency of individual words and this application exported a text file with the word, frequency and length. Then, this document was imported into excel where the length column was deleted and it was exported as a CSV (comma separated value) document. I imported the CSV into Word and replaced ‘,’ with ‘:’ then copy pasted the data into the advanced wordle generator.

The wordle generator makes the word with a higher number larger in the completed wordle. I had to mess around with the list for a while and remove common english words, but what you see above is a result of this convoluted method of quantifying an entire year.