Oedipus, the Wordle
Tuesday, 9 December 2008 Clay Burell 
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Talk about a "tragic fall."
Andrea Hernandez tagged me for this Wordle Meme:
1. Create a wordle from your blog’s RSS feed.
2. Blog it and describe your reaction. Any surprises?
3. Tag others to do the same.
4. Link back here and to where you were first tagged.
(I don’t know what “link back here” means, but Technorati is dying anyway.)
My reaction? It’s funny what a single 15-page literary essay that you decide to post does to the results of a Wordle. Any guesses on the topic of that essay?
The most interesting thing I see above, besides the nicely serendipitous “falling Oedipus,” is the little word, “Furthermore.” It’s only there because that Oedipus essay was a scholarly study. I avoid “furthermore,” “however,” and all other constipation-indicators in my writing voice today like I avoid, well, constipation (and academic writing). Instead of utilizing “furthermore” and the dreaded “however,” I use “also” and “but.”
This member of the Temple of Reason is glad to see that “science” and “education” elbowed their way into the Oedipal complex (and for the record, I love my Dad and my Mom – but not that way). He’s also glad to see the words “religion” and “gods” with no Abrahamic example in sight.
Okay, who (I know whom, but reject it) to tag?
I think some of the next generation:
21-year-old whiz Post-Punk Nerd S.P. Greenlaw.
High school whiz Teny Eurdekian (of Weltanschaaung).
And let’s throw Old Guy Michael Doyle, the Science Teacher, in there for good measure. (“Clam” will be his biggest word.) He’s younger at heart than most of us.
Feel free to decline, of course. And thanks, Andrea. (Did you notice the Obama change.gov website used Wordle last week or so?)
- Wordle Caption Competition Winner, Photoshop/Gimp Goodness
- Sophocles, Oedipus, and the Fallacy of Free Will
- Wordle with Teeth: U of Quebec’s Vocab Profiler
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No. 1 — December 9th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[...] Clay Burell tagged for my very first meme! [...]
No. 2 — December 9th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
This was pretty fun! Thanks for the tag.
spgreenlaws last blog post..Meme is such a solipsistic sounding word…
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No. 3 — December 9th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Ha! Thanks for the tag…I’ll play with it this afternoon. Had to go to a wake last night. (I have a hypothesis: the longer your ear hairs grow, the higher the wake:wedding ratio (redundant, yes). The pocket that used to hold directions to receptions now holds funeral cards.)
The thing about clams, the more I get to know them, the more I don’t and do want to eat them, and the more I do and don’t know about the universe.
Michael Doyles last blog post..The Life of an Antarctica Archipelago redux
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No. 4 — December 10th, 2008 at 12:12 am
I love the falling Oedipus. The other word that jumps out at me right off the bat is fate. Very interesting, very poetic.
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No. 5 — December 10th, 2008 at 2:17 am
I like how ‘chance’ and ‘fate’ kind of jump out, given that Oedipus has got to be one of the canonical treatments of the topics. Think the Greeks’ preoccupation with fate, chance, and humankind’s response is, to me, one of the most fascinating aspects of their literature.
If you’d like a tagcloud that might give you a more accurate picture of your feed as a whole, you might try an open-source project I just finished, FeedVis; it lets you zoom in on specific days and see how word use changes over time. You can upload a whole opml full of other feeds, too. Wow, I sound like one of those advertisements for knock-off colognes: “if you like ck1, you love…’El Maximo!’ ”
Anyway, I’m off to read your Oedipus Rex essay; sounds cool.
Jason Priems last blog post..FeedVis 2.0: custom visualization for your feeds
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 10th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Jason, that sounds like an interesting application you created. Let me get some sleep and look into it.
Feel free to tell us more about it – especially if you can see any educational applications it might have in writing classrooms, etc.
El Maximo. Slays me
The Oedipus essay, being written for an academic audience, is often not “unsucky.” But I do like the info on the historical context at the end. Walter Burkert is an amazing scholar of Greek religion. I drew on him a lot for that section.
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Jason Priem Reply:
December 10th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
The idea behind FeedVis is to help users summarize and find trends in groups of feeds in real time. I think this could be quite useful for a class full of student bloggers.
They could upload the opml with all their feeds, and then use the app to see what the class as a whole is talking about, and how that’s changing. The data’s updated daily, so they could check their group’s tagcloud regularly, to get a feel for how the conversation has changed that day. Then, since clicking on keywords gives them summaries and links to posts, they could use FeedVis to navigate to the posts that interest them.
All of this could be improved, of course; for instance, you could use tags instead of or in addition to simple text word frequency, or you could use a more sophisticated text-mining technique. But this is just a first version. I hope to add to it once I get my grad school applications out of the way later this month. And of course I’m always open to and interested in suggestions.
Jason Priems last blog post..FeedVis 2.0: custom visualization for your feeds
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No. 6 — December 10th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Thanks for the tag! I was wondering where people were creating these personalized poetic-patchworks from. Fall of Achilles would have been interesting too.
“Furthermore” annoys me as well; this summer during an art debate at a pre-college program a student repeated “furthermore” after every statement she made… it was painful to hear! Although I have my own horrid habits in overusing the three “P’s” in writing (probably, perhaps, and parenthesis).
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 10th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Well it’s about time you said something, Teny.
If there’s a reason for “probably” and “perhaps,” I don’t think they’re constipated (and as for the third “p,” I don’t have a problem with it, though that doesn’t mean it’s not problematic).
You come back now, you hear?
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Jason Priem Reply:
December 10th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Teny’s comment probably suggests that he may well be objecting to the first two P’s as perennial engines of what is generally agreed to be an academic game of what appears to be endless qualification; perhaps he would be likely to agree that simple, direct statements that actually stake a claim would, it could be argued, make for better writing. Furthermore, it is most likely the case that parentheses (while not a priori improper) seem often to be used (in academic writing) as, according to many observers, a crutch for what could be referred to as lazy, sloppy prose; however, more research on this topic is almost certainly needed.
Jason Priems last blog post..FeedVis 2.0: custom visualization for your feeds
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 10th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Jason, yer killing me.
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Teny Eurdekian Reply:
December 11th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Hahaha Jason! Your reply just made my day
I’m a girl btw
Teny Eurdekians last blog post..Aristophanes’s Speech (from Plato’s Symposium)
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Jason Priem Reply:
December 11th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Doh–apologies, Teny.
Jason Priems last blog post..FeedVis 2.0: custom visualization for your feeds
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No. 7 — December 11th, 2008 at 4:06 am
Heh- I actually did this back on the 1st of November. I think it makes sense mostly. But technology being THAT big? Wow. I think I also got the tags & categories slipped in there the way I did it… which certainly would make a difference.
So here’s mine then- http://nashworld.edublogs.org/about/
I’ll have to do another. November likely changed things around a bit.
I also see that “however” is fairly large in mine… sucktastic to be sure.
Sean
Sean Nashs last blog post..Inspire First, Instruct Later
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No. 8 — December 12th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
You know…. as cool as I think Wordle.net is. And as enthusiastically as I introduced it to my staff (and folks from many many others in the area)… I think it has now jumped the shark in my building.
I saw a huge display on a hallway wall today that was ohhhh so pretty- but lacked cognitive stones.
Ick.
;-(
Sean Nashs last blog post..Inspire First, Instruct Later
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 12th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Sean, I’m with you on Wordle’s low-nutrient value. I’ve argued more than once that it’s eye candy. If it’s going to be used as anything more in the classroom, a teacher really has to be on his/her game.
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