Using Wordle Images to Hear What’s Said

January 27, 2009 by

Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day" didn’t really impress me. It was what it was: an occasional poem that tried very hard to sum up a moment of emotion and history.

The poem was quite suitable, but I wanted something that would make me cheer or smile or weep (even if it was with tears of joy). But the reading brought nothing. It was just a poet, sharing a nice little poem.

Maybe I’m spoiled. I worked in the same English Department as Nikki Giovanni when I was in the classroom. Nikki can knock you on the ground when she recites her poetry. That’s what I wanted, but the closest I got that day was that sassy benediction from Rev. Joseph E. Lowery.

Alexander’s poem didn’t give me what I wanted, so I politely tucked it away and made no plans to return to it. That was until I ran across the ReadWriteWeb post sharing word clouds of presidential inauguration addresses.The highlighted words in the Wordle images so clearly communicated a specific moment in time. President Bush’s 2005 address had to defend a war on foreign soil. Was it any wonder that freedom was the most heard word? President Clinton, the president who lead the nation into the 21st century, repeated the word century more than any other in his 1997 address.

My thoughts on the word clouds grew into my Inbox blog for this month, Wordle and the Inauguration. I found the text for four inaugural poem online and created Wordle clouds for each of them:

The way the words fell together for each poem was random. The size of the words is based on the number of times they were repeated, but the relationship among the words wasn’t something I controlled. The computer algorithm behind Wordle laid out the words in the "Half and Half" pattern. In other words, a relatively even number of words are shown with horizontal alignment versus vertical alignment:

Wordle: Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander

When I looked at Alexander’s poem, I saw so much more than I had heard. Suddenly, I had a "love song" and thought of how we all "need words [of] praise." Or the poem might be a "song [of] praise"  for "love" and "need" and how the two are inevitably linked. Smaller words in the image told me, "Consider struggle, walking, patching, darning. Begin. Repair thyself, teacher."

"Aye," I thought, "repair yourself." I had dismissed a perfectly lovely and meaningful poem because  my first experience with it wasn’t monumental enough. Maybe it wasn’t a great reading last Tuesday, but it is a good poem for the moment. The Wordle image reminded me that there are deeper ways to read and things to see that a video or a single reading can never capture.

Filed under NCTE Inbox, poetry

Manuscript Scraps

January 27, 2009 by

I’ve spent the evening getting ready for a conference call tomorrow morning. Part of the work has been logistical–rearranging things in the room so that I can set up a printer. Online documents are great, but I still rely on printouts when I’m in meetings. It’s an old habit, born of necessity. The one time I took my laptop to a meeting at work, I was reprimanded and told to never do it again. So much for the 21st-century workplace, huh? Along with my printouts, I rounded up a journal to take notes in.

Filed under Personal Journal

Idea Hamster Syndrome

January 16, 2009 by

I’ve been trying to decide "the next thing" I want to write about for a long time now.

  • I could write about passages in the book I’m reading (The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging).
  • I have some notes on revision that I’d like to explore.
  • I’ve saved news articles on the Wayback Machine, the Flickr 365 Project, grammar choices in online writing, and ways to entice boys to read more.
  • Yesterday in Books-a-Million, I found 5 more books for my collection of young adult fiction that incorporate computers in an integral way. I need to write about all of them.
  • I have a bunch of notes on effective writing online that I could work into something.
  • I’ve printed out calls for manuscripts from English Journal, Voices from the Middle,  and Teaching in the Two-Year College,.
  • I’ve been doing some thinking on how scrapbooking and cardmaking magazines and resources talk about writing, from motivation to writing prompts.
  • I have notes in several of my "idea" journals that I could write about.
  • I found a number of starters for Lists of Ten that I could finish out and post.

I have plenty to write about—and I am writing.I have lots of scribbled notes, on paper and in pixels. It’s not blank page syndrome.

It’s sort of the opposite. I have all these pages, but I can’t decide which one to explore more deeply and publish. It’s Too Many Full Pages Syndrome.

Or maybe it’s more like Writer’s Attention Deficit Disorder. I keep spinning from topic to topic to topic, unable to focus on any of them long enough. The ideas are all interesting, and I don’t want to ignore any of them long enough to click that publish button.

Back in 1994, at the Computers and Writing Conference in Columbia, Missouri, Eric Crump called me an "idea hamster," someone who just keeps scurrying around on the hamster wheel, pitching out good ideas. I have notebooks, bookmarks, annotations, rough draft. There are dozens of ideas I’ve spun out. I just have the quintessential problem of an idea hamster—how do I manage to stop scurrying around the wheel and settle down with an idea long enough to get something done?

Filed under Personal Journal