By Daniel Rigney and wordle.com
Today's column reports on my continuing thought experiment with wordclouding (or cloudword puzzles, or whatever we call them) as first reported yesterday in "Taste Test" and "Real NYRB Personals" (May 10, 2011).
Here once again I'm looking at anonymous personal ads as short-short stories that may say interesting things, not just about the micro-lives of personal advertisers themselves, but also about the macro-lives that people create and share socially and culturally -- in this instance, the people enmeshed in the intricate and elaborate cultural web that is Los Angeles, California, USA, circa 2011.
The adwords below are historical and cultural ephemera par excellence, deserving of a close if fleeting look for what they might tell us about our times.
In today's post, I have culled words from ads in Craig's List (Los Angeles/Personals/Lost Connections). Then I've sliced and diced them and thrown them into worldle.com's word salad maker (thank you again, Wordle) to come up with the following word photo of a certain segment of Los Angeles life in the early 21st century.
The authors of these ads are the souls I'm calling, without derision, the "Lost Angels of Los Angeles." (I just couldn't resist the pun.) I'm guessing these folks are mostly younger, mostly single, fairly diverse with respect to ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, and probably more educationally and electronically plugged in than a representative sample of Angelenos in general. But I'm just guessing.
Click the word cloud below for a sharper image. The more closely you examine this configuration, the more enjoyment you're likely to take from it.
Today's column reports on my continuing thought experiment with wordclouding (or cloudword puzzles, or whatever we call them) as first reported yesterday in "Taste Test" and "Real NYRB Personals" (May 10, 2011).
Here once again I'm looking at anonymous personal ads as short-short stories that may say interesting things, not just about the micro-lives of personal advertisers themselves, but also about the macro-lives that people create and share socially and culturally -- in this instance, the people enmeshed in the intricate and elaborate cultural web that is Los Angeles, California, USA, circa 2011.
The adwords below are historical and cultural ephemera par excellence, deserving of a close if fleeting look for what they might tell us about our times.
In today's post, I have culled words from ads in Craig's List (Los Angeles/Personals/Lost Connections). Then I've sliced and diced them and thrown them into worldle.com's word salad maker (thank you again, Wordle) to come up with the following word photo of a certain segment of Los Angeles life in the early 21st century.
The authors of these ads are the souls I'm calling, without derision, the "Lost Angels of Los Angeles." (I just couldn't resist the pun.) I'm guessing these folks are mostly younger, mostly single, fairly diverse with respect to ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, and probably more educationally and electronically plugged in than a representative sample of Angelenos in general. But I'm just guessing.
Click the word cloud below for a sharper image. The more closely you examine this configuration, the more enjoyment you're likely to take from it.
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