My short investigation into word clouds led me to Wordle, a website that generates word clouds from text that you provide, giving greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. This sparked my curiosity regarding cultural texts and the prominence of certain words over others. This is a great mechanism for sifting out themes, uncovering like gems out of the silt. This digital visualization is useful in understanding the key messages in different texts, both popular and personal. On a large scale, popular texts, such as an inaugural speech, influence collective consciousness, so it is important to see the main ideas being relayed. On a personal level, it would be interesting to visualize your own private diary, or a paper that you wrote, and to see the main ideas that you are communicating either to yourself or others.
To create my first word cloud on this site, I entered my paper, Taking Back the Tech: Contemporary Applications of Cyberfeminist Practices Online, which explores the relevancy of cyberfeminism today. Dominant themes include technology, feminism, gender newness, and movement. The second word cloud is created from President Obama's inaugural speech. Dominant themes include the nation, newness, today, generation, less, common, power, economy, women, and the earth. Finally, I created a cloud based on my blog to glean themes for my final project.
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