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?