Tag-Cloudy Januaries
I am amused, sometimes delighted, occasionally perplexed, by tag clouds. Regardless, I had wanted to make my own. So today I found out about TagCrowd, and now I can make my own. About what?
Well, the obvious answer is: about me. I'm still thinking of processing all the text from Bearcastle Blog, but that will take some work. In the meantime, I took an easy route to a quick experiment, just to see whether the results might be intesting.
Here, then, are tag clouds (below) for Bearcastle Blog for all the January posts of this year and the previous three years (i.e., for January 2008, January 2007, January 2006, and January 2005).
I'm not sure yet what conclusions to draw, but they do give me things to ponder. Naturally, I made some off-the-cuff observations:
- "gay" has been a perennial topic, which doesn't surprise me. It seems a little less prominent in 2008, which may be a fluctuation or it may be that I use the word somewhat less often. For instance, I purposely refer to "marriage equality" rather than "gay marriage"
- To me I looked more angry in 2006, but that may just be because "Bush" is so evident in the cloud.
- "Science" has become more prominent, I suspect because I've been doing more work on Ars Hermeneutica and, consequently, talking more about it.
- "Alan" is a fluke: in a post about a story of mine that featured a character named Alan, I used Word's autosummarize feature on the story and the name "Alan" appeared an unusual number of times.
- I'm happy to see that "book" and "reading" have consistent places in the clouds, and have gotten bigger lately.
- I don't at all mind that I seem to be talking less about political issues.
I think the statistics are rather small on these month-long snapshots to be really deep, but that doesn't mean the clouds misrepresent the content, merely that one must perhaps be a bit careful in interpreting the results. It does make me want to make some bigger trials. *
January 2008
January 2007
January 2006
January 2005
———-
* Of course, it could also be fun to analyze the comments, say, of RSF & SW, to see whether their preoccupations accord with our impressions of their preoccupations!