Better optics than Avatar

Here I thought I was so au courant, getting an iPhone and going to Avatar and making word clouds. And now I find out that while I’m so proud of my new texting capability, my son can send a 300 word text message with his arms wrapped around a subway pole. And of course I hated Avatar.

But the worst thing is that I read somewhere (maybe being au courant and memory are related, because I have no idea where) that word clouds are so 2007. What to do?

One day (after Brown vs. Coakley upended our world) I was trying to figure out a way to visualize what I was going to write about if I had to eschew politics, saints, Catholic feast days, celebrations, God, time, calendars, and life’s purpose. I came up with a sad little pie chart, which is not only so 1907, but one of my most loyal readers told me she had no idea what I was talking about.

Well, this friend may be glad to know I’ve found a really cool (and au courant) site called Many Eyes, which produces pictures that are a lot better than either word clouds or pies. I’ve used it first to visualize the categories I’ve written about:

No one really cares about this but me, but now that I’ve tested the site out, I think I’m going to see whether those tea-bagging ladies in the supermarket were right about the State of the Union. Stay tuned.

So you don’t have to listen…

There’s some site that calls itself Watching Fox, so you don’t have to,” or something like that. Well, since I love wordclouds so much, here is “Wordclouding Rush Limbaugh, so you don’t have to listen” (from yesterday’s radio show):

Think he’s obsessed at all? And why do you think the word “White” is so big?

Oh how I love word clouds

This is a word cloud picture of Celebrating Time. I could play with this for hours.

Momentarily forgetting Sarah Palin

I worked as a research assistant for a psychoanalyst right after college. He was studying “momentary forgetting,” like when you suddenly forget what you were just about to say. His theory was that it’s triggered by talking about painful or difficult issues – and it did seem to happen a lot in his therapy sessions.

I’d listen to his sessions (the ones his patients had given him permission to tape), and transcribe the paragraph or two preceding and following the momentary forgetting. Then we’d do a content analysis to see what was going on. The whole process took years, but we finally concluded his hypothesis was correct.

But oh my god could we have used word clouds! I love them, and I’ve just discovered I can add them over here on the right – making things look a little messy, but oh so much more interesting. I love how Bush and Cheney are sandwiched in there between Roman festivals and all kinds of Catholic and Christian stuff, with a tiny little atheism taking a stand. And then we have Jesus, marriage equality, and OBAMA, all nicely placed.

And dear Sarah Palin: I’m sorry you’re so tiny. Maybe I’ll have to make it up to you – could you please do the next thing you’re going to do?