Word-clouds!

Kathy Evertz is the director of the Academic Support Center at Carleton, so when I was working as a writing tutor this fall, I spent some time with her. Now more than once when I was listening to Kathy in a meeting, she pulled up one of those word-clouds on the screen. Word-clouds are those things that display the most frequently-used words in a document and show more-frequently-used words in bigger font. She made word clouds of student comments about tutors and of advice for tutors, thereby demonstrating to us the essentials of what the comments and advice contained.

Anyway, I thought these were kind of silly!

But then a couple of months ago I came across this lovely website that makes word-clouds, and I started making them all over the place. I made a word-cloud of my cow-jumping-over-the-moon story (most-used words were "Vegetable-ears" [75], "moon" [73], and "barn" [48]), of the paper I was writing for class ("letter" [56], "Sara" [47], and "Coleridge" [45]), and of Book 1 of Paradise Lost ("thir" [66], "heav'n" [33], and "hell" and "gods" [16].

Here is a word-cloud of this blog:

anyway (9) around (5) ball (7) beowulf (9) blog (10) boston (5) break (12) christmas (9) couple (5) going (10) heaney (5) hook (5) jimmy (11) keep (5) knitting (16) labels (6) laura (9) leg-warmers (13) library (5) listening (8) lot (6) love (6) maybe (6) momo (7) night (6) pattern (7) picture (19) post (5) pretty (7) projects (12) prospero (5) quite (5) ravelry (7) read (11) really (28) seamus (5) shakespeare (8) shel (6) silverstein (6) something (5) sometimes (5) spinning (10) started (5) tempest (7) things (7) think (7) twist (7) work (10) yarn (21) year (11)

created at TagCrowd.com

It seems that I "really" enjoy "pictures" of "knitting" "yarn..." Really, an inordinate amount of fiber-arts terms made it on here! I guess I'm not really surprised by this though!Because they are fun, here are a couple of more word-clouds!


The All-Campus E-mail from November 9, 2009:

-a (3) 9th (5) accidentals (4) art (5) available (4) book (4) br (3) campus (6) carleton (42) committee (4) community (5) concert (4) csa (9) dfl (4) discussion (4) documents (8) donate (4) duerm (3) e-mail (4) edu (22) email (4) entenza (3) event (6) foundation (4) graduation (6) guide (4) haiti (5) hall (5) house (4) include (6) information (4) interested (4) meal (5) meeting (8) multicultural (6) night (3) nov (4) participate (4) please (5) pm (8) quakers (5) questions (4) secretary (4) senior (4) signing (4) statement (4) study (3) submitted (14) values (4) week (6)

created at TagCrowd.com

The Declaration of Independence:

abolishing (3) absolute (3) acts (3) assent (4) becomes (3) benjamin (3) colonies (4) connected (3) consent (3) declare (6) establishing (3) foreign (3) form (4) francis (3) free (4) george (6) government (6) history (2) hold (3) independent (4) john (7) jr (3) justice (3) laws (9) legislative (3) legislature (4) mankind (3) necessary (2) obstructed (2) others (3) pass (3) peace (3) people (10) powers (8) pretended (2) refused (3) repeated (3) rights (3) samuel (3) seas (3) separation (3) states (9) suffer (3) suspended (3) thomas (6) united (2) usurpations (3) war (3) william (7) world (3)

created at TagCrowd.com

This awesome news article:

african (2) ago (5) alaska (4) although (2) america (4) american (3) ancient (3) animals (3) barnett (3) bigger (2) britain (2) cats (3) cave (2) co-author (2) deer (2) distinct (2) dna (2) dr (7) eurasia (2) extinct (5) genetic (4) germany (2) giant (6) groups (3) ice (2) icy (2) lions (20) lived (2) mammoth (2) mass (2) nobby (3) north (4) oxford (5) particular (2) pleistocene (3) research (5) shows (2) siberia (2) skull (2) super-sized (2) team (4) today (5) tundra (2) uk (2) university (4) usa (2) wildcru (2) woolly (2) yamaguchi (3) years (6)

created at TagCrowd.com

I've been knitting and knitting the last few days - I'm going down to Carleton this weekend and would love to have everything done by then!

Tomorrow I start my pottery class at the Northern Clay Center, and on Thursday, Julia and I are installing our sculpture at Parker's Lake!!

love, Jimmy