In the spirit of homecoming weekend, I decided to do my wordle piece on the University of Maryland football team. Specifically, I opted to use an article that concerned how Under Armour partnered with the team to produce one of the coolest twists on a theme that I had seen a team do. Ever since its release several year back, Treyarch’s hit game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has been a popular hit with the young adults around the world; it has also spawned many a spin off and tribute. Prior to a game against highly ranked West Virginia, the Terrapins unveiled their shocking choice of uniforms; the theme was met with an overwhelmingly positive feedback. The theme was dubbed “White Ops, as evidenced by the patterning and coloration of the uniform as a whole. The piece I did the world on is a opinionated, direct review of the White Ops uniform.

The wordle of the review provides several clear clues as to the content of the article; for example, the words “Uniforms”, “Maryland” and “White Ops” stand out prominently. The wordle seems to entice the viewer to “look” at them, calling their attention to the “Style” and its “colors”. The contrast of the black, and Cardinal red on the white background of the uniform itself is almost echoed in the visualization provided by the wordle. In fact, on closer inspection, the outer shape of the conflagration of words appears to resemble the sole of a shoe. Furthermore, I chose the white background with black wording in order to reflect the uniform’s style.

Although the representation the reading visualization provides is relatively accurate regarding both the scope and content of the article, it is still lacking in that some elements seem to be missing. If I could change anything about it, I would expand the interface in order to allow the creator more customization choices. For example, I would allow the reader to choose whether or not to add a color border to the outside of words. One to the driving elements that brought the combination to life was the subtle, red outline that traced the numbers on the jersey. Without an option to add a border to the words, the wordle missed out on a crucial part of the visualization. In addition, I would provide the user more freedom to create a background for the words. Another significant element of the uniform was the light gray used in the state flag’s crest on the uniform; this too was unable to be worked into the wordle and again, served to lessen the the visual impact on the reader.

Source article: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1343282-grading-marylands-white-ops-uniforms-to-be-sported-against-west-virginia

For this assignment, I decided to make a distance reading visualization of the Homestuck text archive. Homestuck, is a long-running multimedia web-comic parody of the adventure game genre. Note that though the comic does have a lot of text (My input text contained 477993 words), many pages are entirely text free, and take the form of animated gifs, flash animations, or interactive games which obviously could not be represented. Interestingly, in analyzing the Wordle creation, easily the most common words are two letter acronyms which don’t necessarily provide any information to an outsider. These acronyms are in fact the chat-client name acronyms of several of the more prominent main characters (TG=turntechGod=Dave Strider, TT=tentacleTherapist=Rose Lalonde, EB=ectoBiologist=John Egbert, GC=gallowsCalibrator=Terezi Pyrope, etc.) In a sense, this really speaks to several of the main features of Homestuck as a whole. Primarily, that it is extremely self referential, and difficult to follow without all relevant background information. It also involves a large amount of dialog over chat-clients, each line of which is preceded by the speaking character’s acronym (but not name). The text also indicates several common themes in Homestuck, NOW and TIME, are both indicative of the extreme prevalence of time travel and time paradoxes in the plot. THINK and KNOW are both also fairly prominent, and vaguely indicate the self aware nature of much of the comic and its characters. Other interesting points include the fact that though common English words were removed from the Wordle, consistent quirk spellings of these words weren’t. Several of the main characters speak in highly characteristic manners, 3MPLOY1NG ON3 OR MOR3 TYP1NG QU1RKS 4ND 4 S1GN4TUR3 COLOR. Though the colors obviously could not be carried through, words like TH3 and 4ND were both fairly common in the wordle.

For a new distance reading tool, I am imagining a system which takes input text and produces a web of links between the words/themes as they are related to each other in the text. For instance, if a character is frequently described as thin, that would be represented as a line between the name of the character and the word thin. The ‘tension’ of the line would be proportional to the relative frequency/importance of the relation, which would bring closely tied ideas closer, and allow only slightly associated terms to drift farther apart. This would allow the user to not only to better perceive the relevant themes within the book, but perhaps find new ones.

In summary:

I chose to make a Wordle of my short story “Farsighted” that I wrote last semester in an honors seminar.  I chose this story because it is the longest thing I have written, so there would be more for the Wordle generator to work with.  Plus, I figured it would help me analyze my writing style and word choices.

It is apparent that the two most used words are “Jacob” and “Harper.”  This makes sense because they are the names of the two main characters.  Also, this story is written in third person, so I addressed them with their names and respective pronouns.

What was a little disappointing to me as writer was the fact that it appears that the next most used words are “just” and “back.”  When I first saw them on the Wordle, I was surprised, thinking that those were two odd words to be used so frequently.  But then when I looked back (haha…there’s that word again) at my story, I realized that I did used them quite a bit.  My story is full of phrases such as “just because,” “just as,” “just then,” “standing back up,” “looking back up,” and “walking back over.”  These phrases are fine every once in a while, but after a while it seems a bit repetitive and takes away from the quality of writing.

Another common word I used was “eyes.”  This was a word that I thought made sense to be used so many times.  First of all, the name of the story is “Farsighted,” which has to do with eyesight.  Jacob is constantly telling Harper to get her eyes checked out (both literally and metaphorically), because she can’t see what’s right in front of her.  Also, when I write, I tend to show emotion through the description of my characters’ eyes, through phrases like “bright eyes,” “watering eyes,” “averted eyes,” and “eyes burning with intensity.”

What this Wordle doesn’t tell you is the premise of my story.  Basically, it’s your typical best-friends-into-lovers type of story.  Jacob and Harper are best friends, but Jacob is in love with Harper and is waiting for her to figure out that she actually loves him too.  But interestingly enough, “love” is not that common of a word in the story, and neither is “friend.”  You would think that they would be the most common, considering that they are two major themes in the story.  But this is due to the fact that themes don’t simply arise from the words in the story–they come from the meaning of the words as a whole.

What would be really cool is if there was a distant reading tool that was able to visualize the meaning of the text, as well as the themes.  I’m not really sure how it would work, but it would be really neat of somehow it was organized so that the theme was the largest word, and then all associated words with that theme were smaller and underneath or around it.  I think that would be another interesting way to use distant reading tools.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5895626/Sam_and_Zombies

I chose to visualize my “Baptism of Death” narrative from week four for this assignment. Making a connection between the text generator and details underlying the narrative may seem easier because I knew the inspiration behind the story. I assumed that the largest words would be those alluding to zombies and some sort of chaos: I was partially correct. The most prominent word was zombies while a few of the smaller words do reflect chaos.

To someone looking at the Wordle, the largest words may seem disconnected. Those words are teleporter, zombies, room, elevator, leg, and Sam.  The accuracy of these words is very good in mentioning the main subjects of the narrative. By connecting the larger words, the viewer of the Wordle may believe Sam comes in contact with zombies, a teleporter, and an elevator at some point. Unfortunately, the words do not reveal any clues about any details describing actions within the story or the significance of the larger words.

The smallest words provide the details surrounding those important parts in the story. Words such as running, pistols, American, and blood suggest an environment with war or some kind of chaos. Surprisingly, these words help explain some of the questions left behind by the larger words. By connecting the smaller words, one may believe that an American is running with pistols and interacts with blood in some way. Combining this inference with the inference created by the large words, a possible connection between the words may be that an American named Sam is running from zombies. This explanation would also clarify what blood has to do with the story and why chaos is apparent.

A distant reading tool I think would be very helpful is a tool similar to a search bar that can search for possible sources of inspiration behind a story. The first thing that comes to mind when I want to search for the connection between words and phrases is the Google search bar. In some cases, the search returns results directly related to what I searched for and people or ideas that may be associated with it as well. What if a distant reading tool incorporated this into what words appear on your screen? An entirely new story could be created by linking the most popular words in returned articles by Google. If those words were glowing or somehow looked different from words in the original Wordle, it may help viewers decipher some hidden messages that could be associated with other sources of inspiration. I did this for my own Wordle. I typed the largest words in Google and the list of articles that appeared were all connected to the game “Call of Duty” which was my inspiration for my story. By connecting that game to the words seen in the Wordle, the visualization may be even more effective.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5892811/Welcome_to_Sim_City%2C_TN%3A_Where_the_View_is_Deadly

After playing around with the site a bit and fiddling with the font styles and color choices I finally created a visual that I really liked, but there was a problem.  When I looked back at the overall layout of the picture I soon realized that sure, it was eye catching, but it did not capture the main idea of the original written story.  There are words that were larger than others that should have been in a smaller font and vice versa.  The premise of the story was about how my character Laila decided to pick up and move because she needed change.  She made the choice to move to a town in TN where she quickly becomes friends with a woman named Narelle and over time she meets this guy named Isiaic and well, the rest is to be determined.

With that said, it is evident that one main aspect missing from the distant visualization is the mention of the name Laila.  On the other hand there are things that the visualization got right and that were pertinent to the story.  For instance, the mentioning of Tennessee, and the citing of the words moving, time, Sims, home and even deadly. All of these words are key to the outcome of the story as mentioned above.  Without them the story would not have been what it was originally written as.  Although the visual is quite cool and extracts what it believes are the main words of the written piece there is still something about the written word itself.  When you pick up a story and start reading line by line, you as the reader begin to fluctuate your voice where you feel it’s needed in order to fully grasp the meaning and feeling the story is attempting to portray, but you cannot do that with the visualization.  With this you basically have to read between the lines in a sense and hope you get the full meaning, but the truth of the matter is that no matter how long and hard we try, it won’t be the same.

As for a new distant reading tool, I believe that my concept would be simple:  a tool that REALLY grasps the main concept of a piece of work to the point where if somewhere were to view the visualization they would fully understand the entirety of the story as if they were reading a written story.  But, until then, we guess we must take our fares as we find them and stick to what we know!

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5883767/Pride_and_Prejudice

For my distance reading, I chose to take a look at the text from the novel “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen.

I was initially struck by the prominence of names in this wordle. Every single “large” word is a name or a title – Elizabeth, Darcy, Mr., Mrs., Jane, etc. But then I remembered that Pride and Prejudice is a 3rd person novel and therefore proper names are a lot more frequently used than “I” or “you” which would have been excluded from this wordle anyway and therefore made way for some of the other words to show up, aside from names.

Something I do find interesting and possibly telling about the prominence of names, however, is that it shows the age and gender differences between the different characters and the way that those differences were represented in conversation and relationships between those characters in the novel and in that era of life. Mr. is more commonly used than Mrs., even though I’d say there was a pretty even split of female and male characters of prominence. Furthermore, the most popular female name is Elizabeth, a first name, while the most common male name is Darcy, a last name. It was Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, not Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam, or Ms. Bennett and Mr. Darcy. It seems to indicate that the males and the elders in the novel got a heightened level of respect. This trend of male surnames and female forenames is further represented in the wordle by the appearances of “Jane,” “Bingley,” and “Lydia,” among others.

There’s also an interesting trend that pretty much every word that isn’t a name or a title is some word of relationship – “father,” “family,” “daughter,” “dear,” etc. all indicate an emphasis on relationships between people – a focus of the novel. It is also intersting that the biggest non-name word is “must,” a theme in this book. The novel focuses on what Elizabeth and Jane and proper ladies in society must do in order to lead happy and fulfilled lives – ascribe to gender norms and marry well, living as a happy housewife for the rest of her life.

I was really intrigued to see that the word “love” is one of the smallest words on the graph. For a novel about women getting married, it’s interesting that the word barely gets used, and I think someone who was just looking at this graph would have no idea what the novel is about. With some context though, I think the lack of the use of the word “love” indicates the nature of the plot – the girls were not supposed to get married for love. it could be a fortunate side effect, but the aim of marriage was wealth and social status.

A distant reading tool I wish existed would be one that detects time period of a text based on types of words being used. It would analyze the words and spellings of those words, as well as their context, to determine their time period. Beyond using this as a tool to analyze literature once it’s developed, I think it would be cool just to be able to develop this tool and determine the potential of a collection of words to deliver historical meaning and determine the possibilities of distance reading.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5886220/The_Cat_in_the_Hat

For my word visualization, I decided to focus on the famous children’s book, The Cat in the Hat, written by Dr. Seuss. Before I copied and pasted the word into the generator, I made a few predictions. I expected that the biggest words would most likely be cat, hat. and fun. I also expected words that rhyme together would be another big contributor to the visualization.

I was quite surprised to find that the word “fish” is the biggest word. Not only is it the largest, but it is also separated from the rest of the group. After re-listening to the book (I listened to it to emulate story time) it turns out that fish is said quite a few times. In fact, the fish was more like the party pooper of the group. He was the one who continually tried to be cautious. He constantly reminded the children of the repercussions that they would face from their mother if she found out some of the shenanigans that the trio were getting in to. Although the book is told from a first person point of view, it is the fish who does a lot of the talking.

Other large words that are the same color include “oh”, “hat”, and “like”. Another interesting thing to not is that “mother” and “house” are quite near to one another in both size and position. Both were probably mentioned roughly the same number of times by the fish out of concern.

Another thing to note is the fact that the word “cat” appears as both “Cat” and “cat” (the difference is that the C is capitalized). This must mean that The Cat in the Hat is referred to both as an animal, and referred to by name. One last thing that I found notable was that Sally has her name mentioned in the picture, but not Conrad. This most likely implies that Conrad is the narrator of the story.

If I could make another distant reading tool, I would choose to have the words scroll across the top of the screen in order. By mousing over a single word, the user could find the definition of the word. By clicking on the word, a web of words would pop up showing the synonyms for the clicked word. Right clicking would resume the scrolling of the words. If the mouse has a scroll wheel, scrolling up will cause the words to move faster, and scrolling down will slow them down. I would also like to include a search function that would show instances of keywords in other works. This would eventually lead you to the next work where those words would begin to scroll across the screen.

I used Wordle to generate a word cloud for my narrative “Kids Down the Stairs 2P.” With the maximum number of words changed to 50, the cloud has certain nouns and verbs bigger than others, which indicates higher frequency of some of the words.

The resulting image looks similar to what I expected. I was aware of the words I used more often while writing, so when the image has “step” as the biggest, it does not surprise me at all. Based on the word cloud, I would say my story emphasizes actions and contains several descriptive words such as “disdainful,” “arrogant” and “relief.” A reader who sees the word cloud before reading my story could get a sense of what the actual story is like due to such words.

I always consider generating word clouds a way to check for repetitiveness. My narrative is only 498-word-long, so I was able to keep track of word frequency. But if one is writing a novel or anything more than 1000 words, he or she might want to use a word cloud to examine the first draft and replace certain words with synonyms accordingly.

Nevertheless, this was my first time using Wordle, and while making the word cloud I learned that I can change the font color and style, as well as the appearance of the entire word cloud. I realized I could reveal more aspects of my story by doing so. For instance, I selected gray as the font color to represent stone steps, and I made the words go “any which way” to symbolize the movement of the characters from one step to another. These minor changes allowed me to tell a portion of my story in the word cloud, which I’ve found interesting.

A word cloud does not contain statistics, however. It is more of a form of art than a tool for scientific calculation. Looking at word clouds, people can only tell certain words have higher frequency but can’t tell what exactly is the frequency. Therefore, if I were to improve Wordle, I would include the number of times each word has appeared in the text, perhaps in the form of a small Arabic numeral placed within the first letter of a word.

Another distant reading tool I would like to create if possible is a story generator. A person pastes the literary text in a box. Then the computer generates a new story by taking out words with high frequency and recomposing them. Such a tool not only helps identify repetitiveness and the main theme, it also reveals possibilities of telling a story differently, like the remixed Disney film clips explaining copyright law.

Extra-credit meme (made with Photoshop):

Counter narratives

Item #44 “Rafting In Costa Rica”

(http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/48)

At first glance, this photograph may resemble a picturesque scene of friends bonding in the great outdoors. After taking a closer look however, it seems as if half of the purple raft has disappeared beneath the water. Why is this? In the caption, it says that the group is on a rafting trip in Costa Rica. This is true, but there is one missing piece of information the creator of the picture did not mention: there is a hidden behemoth swimming directly below the waves. The dark portion of the water on the left-hand side of the picture shows an unidentifiable creature pushing against the first raft. If you look at the facial expressions of three of the girls on the first raft, you will notice that they look disturbed. The raft is listing to the left and is undeniably being pulled underwater by the animal creating the dark spot in the water. Following the raft with the scared girls is a second raft. The second raft has clearly seen the turbulent waves around the first raft and has veered towards the right in order to avoid being capsized. They have also seen their comrades on the first raft dealing with some threat that is pulling the back of their craft into the water. It all makes sense now.

Item #96 “Friends in A Dorm Room”

(http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/96)

This picture serves as the alibi for the alleged kidnapper of Coconut, leader and founder of the organization called “The Coconut Club”. Seventy-two hours before this picture was taken, the promotional photo shoot for the organizations new magazine concluded. The only remnant of that event can be found here http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/46. Compare the two pictures. In the item 96, there are five individuals. There are seven individuals, including the coconut, in item 46. Who are the two missing members? Well, Coconut is the first, and Catherine is the second. When Coconut wound up missing, the first suspect was Catherine because she was the only other person absent from item 96. Now let’s take a closer look at item 96. If you look at the bed in the background, you will see a teddy bear. Turn your attention to the left and you will see a small, brown, Coconut-shaped figure. That is Coconut. That leaves one more question to be answered: where is Catherine? Counting from the left hand side of the picture, look between ladies three and four. Between them is a dark coat: the same coat that Catherine wears wherever she goes. The figure behind ladies three and four is undeniably Catherine. After she placed Coconut on the bed, she bent over to tie her shoe and the photographer didn’t catch her in the picture. Therefore, Catherine is innocent and Coconut was never kidnapped.

http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/56

This is actually not a painting of a strawberry dessert. This is actually a painting of a UFO from outer space entering the earth’s atmosphere.  While the painting may resemble a strawberry dessert, it actually marks a much more interesting turn of events in history.  One day, while everyone was going about their daily routines, and unidentified flying object entered earth’s atmosphere in broad daylight. It is unsure of where the UFO actually come from, other than outer space.  Before anyone could examine the UFO, it crashed to the ground and burned up in flames.  Angela was an eyewitness to this event, and to keep it fresh in her memory, she decided to paint a picture.  This is the picture she paints, the UFO surrounded by blue sky.  The title dessert makes the event seems less shocking and more interesting.  To Angela, the UFO would translate well into art form if represented by a dessert.  Her actions are indeed very creative.

http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/103

The title of this picture is “My Angel,” and seems to be about the dog in the picture.  However, this is untrue.  This picture is truly about the carpet that the dog is laying on.  The carpet is indeed the angel in this picture.  This carpet has been passed down in Greg’s family for years.  Because it has been in the family for so long, it seems to have developed mystical powers of its own.  Greg has noticed that as long as the carpet has been in his family, his family has had good luck.  This has been proven because once, they removed the carpet from the house in order for it do go get professionally cleaned.  In the two days that the carpet was gone from the house, everything went wrong.  People kept slipping and tripping in the house,  smoke detectors started going off for no reason,  and a general sense of misfortune clouded the house.  But as soon as they got the carpet back, everything was back to normal.  This event led Greg to believe that the carpet truly is like a guardian angel to his family.