Four Interviews Together

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.

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