Tag Archives: Barack Obama

art, gardening, quotes, rambles

visualize your blog content

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A lot of blogs these days–including this one–have tag clouds in their sidebars. These highly visual displays of tags the blogger has supplied give you a good sense of the kinds of topics the blog covers. And they give you a sense of how often the topics get discussed.

These do a nice job of displaying the words the blogger thought would be important, but they sometimes miss the big picture that you could get by turning an entire post into a cloud, something using all the words in the post, not just the ones supplied by the blogger.

One of the interesting things I saw in the coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration was an Associated Press visualization of his inaugural address using an online tool to analyze the frequency of the words he used. (Perhaps the AP’s analysis was based on one at Free Government Information.) Then the story went on to compare it with a visualized version of George Bush’s 2005 inaugural address.

I used the same tool, TagCrowd, to re-visualize the same Obama speech. TagCrowd picks the most frequently used words and assigns different sizes to them. As in a regular tag cloud, the bigger the visualized word, the more times it was used.

obamaspeech

But instead of comparing it to Bush’s address, I visualized Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, since people seem to compare Obama and Lincoln. You can see how language has shifted over one and a half centuries, as well as how differently the men use words.

lincolnspeech

Interesting, huh?

Then I thought, why not try visualizing some blog posts by turning all the words in blog posts into clouds? Would the results between posts be that different? And would they differ much from the tag cloud in my left sidebar?

The first posting I analyzed is a recent one, “greener gardening practices,” from January 7:

blogpostinggreener

How would that gardening post compare with one of my older hoity-toity art posts? This is the cloud derived from “gardens, phonebooths, poetics and old maids,” a post from January 21, 2008:

blogpostchiricahua

Pretty different clouds, I thought. (And sorry for the typos on “Cochise!”) The different subjects resulted in dramatically different vocabularies and different word emphases. Also, over the last year, I’ve been trying to simplify my writing for the web–not at all dumbing it down, but adapting to how people read text on a screen versus text in a book. That probably contributed to a difference between the two posts.

Try TagCrowd. Compare old posts with new posts, or posts about your garden with those about your friends or travels. Or pick just one text you like to see what the repeated words tell you.

I think you’ll discover some interesting things!

art

talking trees

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If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tuesday morning I had my choice of places to view the televised inauguration of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Working as I do on the UCSD campus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at coffee stands and individual laptops that were all playing the ceremonies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inauguration broadcast through the speakers of lead-plated eucalyptus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stuart Collection.

treesingingLeft: The tree in the installation that plays music.

The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was constructed from three eucalyptus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new construction. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preservative, reassembled, and then covered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stuart Collection’s description offers this explanation:

One could walk through the grove several times before noticing Allen’s two unobtrusive trees.  Not only do these trees reinvest a natural site with a literal sense of magic but they implicitly make connections between nature and death and the life of the spirit.  It is not surprising that students have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”

At the entrance to the vast, geometric library the third tree of Allen’s installation remains silent – perhaps another form of the tree of knowledge, perhaps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build buildings, perhaps a dance form, or perhaps noting that one can acquire knowledge both through observation of nature and through research.

treetalkingfrombelowRight: The tree in the installation that recites poetry.

On Tuesday, the tree that ordinarily recites poetry and the one that typically offers songs and music were dedicated to an audio feed of the Presidential inauguration. The organizers had high hopes, predicting “hundreds of students” would show up for the event. But for the few minutes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen people and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attending with their owners, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).

treemutebarkLeft: The “bark” on the mute tree, showing the nails holding the lead plates, as well as the list of credits of the people who worked on the project.

treemuteLeft: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.

The special programming wasn’t the easiest sell that morning. The inauguration was already a huge event.

I’ll have to admit I had a hard time paying attention the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talking trees in a forest weren’t enough to get people to stop.