Positively Glorious!

Well, not really. That title’s more a reflection of my recent trip through the supermarket aisle containing the flashily provocative titles such as “Barack Obama’s Gay Cover-up.”

It’s not really an accurate title, but hey, it got you here.

So, I love visualization. For the past 10+ years, my work has entailed environmental data, and thus various data visualizations have come across my radar over the past decade. I love them all, create when I can, and search for new ones constantly. Still, although I’ve been a scientist for my entire career, I’ve been a writer for my entire life. Thus, no data visualization I can find compares to the textual visualization of Wordle.net.

I haven’t been writing a great deal lately, and I haven’t been reading either. Life has gotten away with me in more ways than one.¹ Recently, I caught up on a few of my favorite personal blogs, mostly skimming and just checking in. While doing so, I realized that the vast majority of them are written by women.

Now, I do come from a fairly matricentric background, and tend to naturally gravitate towards women. In college, my large circle of friends consisted almost entirely of women. There was one other guy, and when we hung out together, it mostly consisted of us standing around and saying things like “What are we supposed to do now? Know of any good ‘guy’ stuff? We can go to an art museum… that’s a ‘guy’ thing, right?”

Oh, I can play the whole ‘manly’ game, and quite well (you don’t spend 8 years in the military without knowing that game, even women learn it!), but my natural tendency does tends to pull me from the brutal to the subtle.²

So, realizing once again that I was surrounding myself with women– at least the blogs of women (hell, I’ll take what I can get), I thought that I’d  try do something really manly– strip them to their essence and visualize them!

Here they are, the secret thoughts of 5 unnamed women.³ Because I value their privacy, and wouldn’t want the whole world to vizualize them, I’ll keep them completely and utterly anonymous. While I want to write about them a little bit, my main focus will be doing nothing whatsoever to identify each woman.

A Dog Named Jessie

I started reading this anonymous blog after I realized that both she and I had tag clouds that featured the name “Jessie” as the largest tag. My wife, Jessica, was not so happy to learn that this Jessie is… a dog.

I liked this cloud, and featured it first, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s shaped like a really nice sleeveless dress that my Jessie has (my wife’s dress features a Hawaiian hibiscus print, but she’d look equally stunning in a Wordle).

The words are unorganized because I like that this blogger has a way of tossing your normal perceptions into the air, making you re-evaluate your way of seeing the world. It first seems disorienting, both her topics and her writing, but you soon realize that you just need to step back and you see a nice shape emerge. It’s good stuff.

But, way down deep, the real reason I picked it is because I laughed when I read– all jumbled up as they were– the three largest words. I think they’re probably true. She’s just “Like, really busy…”

Okay!?

Californians Anonymous

This anonymous blogher looks best in a stylized font with class, because she’s got class coming out of her ears… and often her bra… on video, even (There was this video thing I saw once… and it had something about a gun… or did I dream it? Oh, nevermind).

Anyway, shes also got a lot of comedy. Not so hidden in this Wordle are dog leggings and a hatred of shit– neither phrase being one which would surprise me if it had occured within 30 seconds into my initial meeting with her.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get this visualization to do what I wanted it to do, which is probably to be expected as our writing is a reflection of ourselves. Eventually, I had to stop trying to shape it and just let it be what it was going to be, which is actually quite a deep and complex pool of images and thoughts…

… and lopsided animals.⁴

Not quite OCD

So, originally, I was only going to do 4 Wordle images. Not because I wanted to limit it, but merely because 4 was the first number that popped into my head as a nice even number that was more than 2, but less daunting than 6. On a whim, I tried one for this anonymous blogger, and immediately knew I had a keeper.

It’s not the words at all that struck me about this image. For this one it was the seductive, entirely red color palatte, the playfully comic font, and the shape– it’s quite suggestive of the female form, is it not?

It was fate. This Wordle was the only one that was completely random. I just typed in an RSS feed and out pops a playful female form dressed all in red. I absolutely had to include it. It’s just way too appropriate.

Techno, it’s not just for music anymore

This Wordle took me by surprise, even as it showed me something familiar and comforting, a reaction I expect I’d find from the anonymous blogger herself.

Words like “community” and “people” are what I expected to see from this mindful writer, as is the predominance of words pertaining to the theme of “home” and “family.” It’s what draws me back to this writer’s blog the way I’m drawn to a warm blanket.

But I was surprised, struck, and saddened by the dominance of CubeSpace. CubeSpace’s closure is a reality I’ve been thinking about a lot– even though I don’t live in Portland. It has affected me in a more detached way than people in Portland, but it’s obvious that it’s affected this writer personally, deeply, overshadowing even the dominant foci of her life.

This is the only one that I couldn’t laugh at. This Wordle made me saddest. It made me think of the word “hug.”

A Strange Mama

Last is hard. We always want to ascribe some meaning to the last of something. I didn’t have a meaning, and I couldn’t decide which one should be last. “What’s the meaning of this one? Does it fit as a last one?” Finally, I just picked one out at random.

But ol’ fate, she’s a wiley li’l vixen isn’t she? As soon as I picked it, I laughed and thought “yup, this one should be last.” Not because she’s the least, and not because she’s not the least. This anonymous blogger should be last because she’d be the first to say something like “Oh give it up, there doesn’t have to be a reason, it’s just last. You did four, you’ve got one left. Get on with it already!”

Much like her oft-seen black and white attire, this blogger reminds us that, you know, sometimes things just are what they are. Stop attributing some deep, existential meaning to the fact that your apple fritter is square and just eat the damn apple fritter, already.

Yet, also like the reality, looking past the black and white representation of “day time,” you’ll see plenty of complexity. There’s plenty of nuance. There’s surprise, there’s adventure, there’s even a horizon. There’s also a heck of a lot in there about a sweet little girl, and an awesome husband.

It’s almost as if she’s reminding herself that there’s a simple view just as much as she’s reminding the rest of us.

Coda

Well, that’s it, my Wordle representations of five women coincident with my ridiculous misperceptions of their true, exposed personalities– gleaned entirely from periodically skimming their blog entries and Twitter posts and maybe meeting them once in person for 30-40 seconds.

But now that you’ve read my ridiculous joke, go back and take a look at them again without the joke. Spend a bit of time on each, and just read the words there without the context of sentences. It’s interesting, and it’s beautiful.

Oh, and here’s another one, a special gift for calling now– just to make it an even 6 (and because she’d kick my ass if I didn’t include her).

I tried like hell to make this anonymous blogger’s Wordle shaped like a banana, but this is the best that I came up with– interestingly, if you rotate it counterclockwise, it’s shaped somewhat like a sleeveless dress, which is weird because her and the first Wordle then match in both hair and clothes. There’s nothing really striking or interesting here for me, but I wouldn’t expect there to be… I took the words from her MySpace page. If I’d made a Wordle of her Twitter favorites stream, now there’s some damn near blackmail-quality fun to be had.

1. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s still a good life, just sometimes a bit… stretched. [↩]
2. A generalization, sure, but you knew exactly what I was talking about, didn’t you? [↩]
3. Chosen from my Google Reader list at random, where “random” means “The first five that I started reading when I thought about this crazy idea.” [↩]
4. … and missing apostrophes, which are only missing because I knew she’d catch it– and that it would bug her. [↩]