Clouds of Knowing

around barnacle birthday book boy bread cake catholic chocolate color cooking couple crash days dinner door family favorite five fluffy going jesuit kids lent lives man math meeting minutes mom morning night piece prayer reading really recipe something sunday think times today tonight until warm water week work writing years

created at TagCrowd.com

Last week I took a road trip to Richmond, VA. I spent 30 hours away from home, 10 of them on I-95. I went to a workshop on Visual Resources, which was fascinating on a variety of levels. The "big questions" on the table were, what do you see when you look at an image? and how do you help others decode an image, to read into it what you want them to? We played with a lot of interesting tools, too.

One of the more powerful examples for me was TextArc (click on Alice to see what I mean). What do you see when you take every word in a text and play them out in an arc around the most commonly occuring words? When you can see what words occur near each other? This is just one example of a text cloud tool. A simpler one is at TagCrowd. I fed my blog posts for this year in to get the following:

My spouse is clearly at the center of my life - and my kids are on my mind. Dinner is right up there, too. I enjoyed some of the accidental connections: "going jesuit" and "minutes mom". Why do I write more about water than chocolate? And is years appearing because of my age??