Get? ... hmm, grr, ahh, yes, it reveals so much about me...

While becoming a master of information, I learned all sorts of things about information visualization - how the human mind processes information, and what designers can do to display information in a way that helps that process.

For some reason, many students - and professors - in the program were enamored with word clouds as information visualization. Everyone wants a visual of words from some corpus resized according to frequency. Throw a word cloud up as "findings" in your presentation, and the class makes non-committal grunts of deep mental contemplation. But I dare you to infer something meaningful from this information jumble.

Still, it is kind of pretty.

So here is a word cloud of my blog, thus far. I did this using Wordle, and got the idea from Janssen. A note of caution if you try this yourself: if you simply paste the url of your blog into Wordle, the resulting cloud will be strongly biased toward your latest posts. To work around this, I copied the text from my entire blog (easy to do if you use a feed reader), removed some meta-notes (things like "post from edibles by Erin" and "stop starstar this post add" that repeated for every post), and pasted the text into Wordle.