This Wordle is made of the first four interviews—each transcribed and combined into one text file to create an experimental, blooming community conversation.

I sense a significant shift in emphasis coming after working with this file. Many of the smaller, or less spoken, words are beginning to gain some prominence as multiple interviewees speak about the same issues. This is good. We have moved from the “YS Mantra” seen in the first two clouds of arts//schools//community into something a bit more nuanced. Towards kids//housing//different//town//things//home//affordable//school//working…

The question becomes whether or not this experiment can actually tell us anything about the meaning the speakers conveyed without knowing something of the relationship of words as they were spoken. People? Community? How many different ways have those words been used, and for what shades of meaning?

But that is the topic of another post, where I will try my best to implement advice gleaned at two recent conferences (Oral History Association and the American Folklore Society) to dig deeper into the “speech mining” I’m trying to do here—with some new tools and some new angles.

This word cloud is made from the transcription of my first three interviews, which can all be found in the slider above. When you click through to look and listen to each interview, you will see a word cloud, but the idea here is to have a blooming community conversation: each new voice transcribed and added to the previous voices collected will change the textual emphasis of the graphic. If you look at the last collective cloud, made of two interviews, you can see the shift in emphasis.

You can make your own Wordle clouds with any text, but I find that transcribed spoken language is very amenable to this algorithm program, as words spoken more often for emphasis are rendered larger in the graphic. And we do tend to repeat ourselves (either immediately or throughout a conversation) on the topics we care the most about.

The wordle above is tricky. It has placed two words together that do not necessarily belong together. Can you find them? My mom would say that if they were a snake, they would jump out and bite you.

“White Springs.” What does that mean to you?

I guarantee that no participant has spoken the phrase. But what they, collectively, have done is speak the word “white” and the words “yellow springs” the nearly exact same amount of times (you will find yellow elsewhere in the cloud). So, in its jigsaw-making manner, Wordle found it appropriate to put those two words together. It was simply a good use of space.

I post this word cloud (as opposed to any other random configuration Wordle would make for me with the same text) because I hope it encourages viewers to listen to the interviews herein, and to add your own thoughts in the comments below.

What is diversity? Are we an ethnically diverse community? Were we? Do we have the collective power to affect these trends, or are these trends beyond our control?

The application “Wordle” (www.wordle.net) will be used throughout the project (for each interview) as an attempt to help visualize–or harvest–meaning from the participants words. I wondered what would would happen if I combined the transcripts from my first two interviews; how do the voices come together? I am interested in watching this collective visual conversation bloom as I work through more interviews.

See the two individual tag clouds here and here.