Wordle-ing my thesis...

I'm feeling stressed today.

In my procrastination efforts I wandered over to Wordle. (Have you been there? It's fun.) On the Wordle home page it explains that:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Wordle is the brain child of Jonathan Feinberg, a software engineer at IBM Research, and I can't figure out how old the site/software is. But, I've been seeing these 'word clouds' reappearing throughout different venues of my life lately -- blog signatures, school event advertisements, wedding invitations -- and I realized by accident that they were all being created here.

So, I thought I'd give it a whirl myself and see what came of it. I inserted the text from the most current four page summary of my thesis work. Then I limited the word-count to 50 (rather than the standard 150), removed all author names, and changed my colors to black and white (my research is about ideologies of race after all). And after a bit of fiddlin', voilà!

In all reality, I'm finding it helpful to have this visual tool. It's helping me see the language I am using most frequently and how those words correlate with themes and my areas of interest. I was surprised, for example, that 'social' is my most frequently used word. I would have thought it might have been 'race,' or 'white,' or 'privilege,' but it's helpful for me to see how really these are all relational terms in a social world. I could go on, but you get the point. What a helpful (and intellectually and aesthetically pleasing) software.

And now back to work...