By Daniel Rigney and wordle.com
Foodies love food, and wordies love words. I confess: I'm a wordie -- not a wordy one, I hope, but a genuine one. I love to tinker with words. They're my tinker toys. [rimshot]
Today I'm reporting another in a series of conceptual experiments in the use of word clouds to create cloud poems. The word-cloud poem shown below is a found poem of the "treated" variety. The words themselves are culled from the most recent list of actual personal ads posted online at the New York Review of Books (accessed on May 10, 2011), and then rearranged, sized and positioned for effect. They're sliced, diced, and tossed in the Wordle-matic. Click on the image for a clearer view.
In yesterday's post (May 9) I satirized these same NYRB personal ads in a purely fictional way. I was trying to say that each individual ad tells a short-short story about its author's personal situation, and that we can imagine invisible narrative threads that link these micro-stories to each other.
The word-cloud poem below, on the other hand, is a more macro-level composite or aggregation of words from many different and seemingly disconnected ad-stories in NYRB. The word cloud gives us one possible bird's-eye view of the larger cultural context within which the ad-stories are told -- in this instance, the rather rarified culture of North American wordies and bookies living in an ever more cosmopolitan and commercial world.
Or maybe the word cloud is just an eye-catching graphic device. You may have noticed that advertisers already know ways to capture eyeballs and "move product" with what amount to word-cloud poems.
In any case, thank you, wordle.com, for making such a promising and easily useable tool available to ordinary non-technos and non-commercios like me. Conceptual and graphic artists and English teachers probably discovered the cloud-word poem years ago, but it's new to me. I'm exploring its possibilities for the fun of it. Others of the reading and writing persuasion might want to do the same.
So again, thank you, Wordle, and may the farce be with you.
Foodies love
food, and wordies love words. I confess: I'm a wordie -- not a wordy
one, I hope, but a genuine one. I love to tinker with words. They're my
tinker toys. [rimshot]
Today I'm reporting another in a series of conceptual experiments in the use of word clouds to create cloud poems. The word-cloud poem shown below is a found poem of the "treated" variety. The words themselves are culled from the most recent list of actual personal ads posted online at the New York Review of Books (accessed on May 10, 2011), and then rearranged, sized and positioned for effect. They're sliced, diced, and tossed in the Wordle-matic. Click on the image for a clearer view.
In yesterday's post (May 9) I satirized these same NYRB personal ads in a purely fictional way. I was trying to say that each individual ad tells a short-short story about its author's personal situation, and that we can imagine invisible narrative threads that link these micro-stories to each other.
The word-cloud poem below, on the other hand, is a more macro-level composite or aggregation of words from many different and seemingly disconnected ad-stories in NYRB. The word cloud gives us one possible bird's-eye view of the larger cultural context within which the ad-stories are told -- in this instance, the rather rarified culture of North American wordies and bookies living in an ever more cosmopolitan and commercial world.
Or maybe the word cloud is just an eye-catching graphic device. You may have noticed that advertisers already know ways to capture eyeballs and "move product" with what amount to word-cloud poems.
In any case, thank you, wordle.com, for making such a promising and easily useable tool available to ordinary non-technos and non-commercios like me. Conceptual and graphic artists and English teachers probably discovered the cloud-word poem years ago, but it's new to me. I'm exploring its possibilities for the fun of it. Others of the reading and writing persuasion might want to do the same.
So again, thank you, Wordle, and may the farce be with you.
Today I'm reporting another in a series of conceptual experiments in the use of word clouds to create cloud poems. The word-cloud poem shown below is a found poem of the "treated" variety. The words themselves are culled from the most recent list of actual personal ads posted online at the New York Review of Books (accessed on May 10, 2011), and then rearranged, sized and positioned for effect. They're sliced, diced, and tossed in the Wordle-matic. Click on the image for a clearer view.
In yesterday's post (May 9) I satirized these same NYRB personal ads in a purely fictional way. I was trying to say that each individual ad tells a short-short story about its author's personal situation, and that we can imagine invisible narrative threads that link these micro-stories to each other.
The word-cloud poem below, on the other hand, is a more macro-level composite or aggregation of words from many different and seemingly disconnected ad-stories in NYRB. The word cloud gives us one possible bird's-eye view of the larger cultural context within which the ad-stories are told -- in this instance, the rather rarified culture of North American wordies and bookies living in an ever more cosmopolitan and commercial world.
Or maybe the word cloud is just an eye-catching graphic device. You may have noticed that advertisers already know ways to capture eyeballs and "move product" with what amount to word-cloud poems.
In any case, thank you, wordle.com, for making such a promising and easily useable tool available to ordinary non-technos and non-commercios like me. Conceptual and graphic artists and English teachers probably discovered the cloud-word poem years ago, but it's new to me. I'm exploring its possibilities for the fun of it. Others of the reading and writing persuasion might want to do the same.
So again, thank you, Wordle, and may the farce be with you.
Foodies love food, and wordies love words. I confess: I'm a wordie -- not a wordy one, I hope, but a genuine one. I love to tinker with words. They're my tinker toys. [rimshot]
Today I'm reporting another in a series of conceptual experiments in the use of word clouds to create cloud poems. The word-cloud poem shown below is a found poem of the "treated" variety. The words themselves are culled from the most recent list of actual personal ads posted online at the New York Review of Books (accessed on May 10, 2011), and then rearranged, sized and positioned for effect. They're sliced, diced, and tossed in the Wordle-matic. Click on the image for a clearer view.
In yesterday's post (May 9) I satirized these same NYRB personal ads in a purely fictional way. I was trying to say that each individual ad tells a short-short story about its author's personal situation, and that we can imagine invisible narrative threads that link these micro-stories to each other.
The word-cloud poem below, on the other hand, is a more macro-level composite or aggregation of words from many different and seemingly disconnected ad-stories in NYRB. The word cloud gives us one possible bird's-eye view of the larger cultural context within which the ad-stories are told -- in this instance, the rather rarified culture of North American wordies and bookies living in an ever more cosmopolitan and commercial world.
Or maybe the word cloud is just an eye-catching graphic device. You may have noticed that advertisers already know ways to capture eyeballs and "move product" with what amount to word-cloud poems.
In any case, thank you, wordle.com, for making such a promising and easily useable tool available to ordinary non-technos and non-commercios like me. Conceptual and graphic artists and English teachers probably discovered the cloud-word poem years ago, but it's new to me. I'm exploring its possibilities for the fun of it. Others of the reading and writing persuasion might want to do the same.
So again, thank you, Wordle, and may the farce be with you.
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