Tuesday, September 23, 2008

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.

3 comments:

The Lunds said...

While looking at Halloween costumes online I found one that reminded me of you, a sock monkey. It gave a good laugh when I saw it.

Dawn said...

I think your word cloud revolves around food! Yum!

Mary Poppins said...

I like how Abe is so prominent. Not as prominent as "just" or "good" though. I think you should refrain from using the words just and good in your blog and replace them with Abe then try it again.