My Contribution to the Internet Pile
For one of my projects earlier in this semester, I made the first wordle out of my tweets. I tried to include all of my tweets but Twitter stops retrieving archived tweets at some point so I had to make do with what I got. It was probably for the best too because the tweets I gathered, from May 2015 to March 2016, took me over a couple of hours to compile by copying and pasting into a word document. There was an option to put the URL into Wordle and it would generate it on its own, but when I did that it included words like “retweeted”, “following”, and “replied” and I knew those didn’t come from my tweets. They came from the webpage layout. Since I wanted this project to feature only my tweets and not my retweets (because I didn’t actually put those words onto the internet I just increased the distance the retweet travels) I had to physically go through and copy and paste each tweet.
After I generated my wordle and got it looking the way I wanted, I began to analyze its actual content. I was surprised by the words I use the most on Twitter and I wondered what words I use the most on other social media platforms and if there would be any continuity between the different platforms I use so I decided to do explore that for my final digital studies project.
For each worldle, I copied and pasted all posts or as much as the website would retrieve from it’s archive into a google doc (view it here) to make it easier to copy and paste into Wordle later on. Once I plugged the copied text into the world website, I began to play around with the form, colors, and font. Each wordle’s background is the exact color taken from the website its content comes from and the font used in each wordle reflects the font style that is used on the site as well. The fonts are not as exact as the colors because Wordle provides uncommon fonts and does not allow the user to download fonts to the site. However, I did keep some constants in the creation of these wordles to make sure they look like a cohesive unit. All wordles consist of the top 150 words I use on each site and they are all in white text. They are also all formated with the words horizontal for easy reading and in a circular orientation rather than a rectangular orientation, which I thought looked too harsh. I also made all the words lower case so there wouldn’t be any distinction between what what capitolized and what wasn’t.
Twitter Wordle Observations:
- Made from 5,250 words from May 2015 until March 2016.
- The Twitter wordle has the most variation in word size because I tweet multiple times a week so it had more content to generate and there was more of a chance for words to be used more than once.
Facebook Wordle Observations:
- Made from 303 words from July 2015 until March 2016.
- The Facebook wordle has the least bariation in word size because I only post to Facebook about once a month or less so there is less of a chance for words to be used more than once.
- The smallest sized words in the Facebook wordle were only used once in my posts. I know this for a fact because it is unlikely that I said “yesssssss” more than once.
Medium Wordle Observations:
- Made from 1,956 words from all content.
- The largest word in the Medium wordle is “book” which is interesting becuase I use Medium for my digital studies class and while the class is the study of all things digital I still find myself talking about analog items more than digital items.
- It was also interesting to see the word “think” in such large letters. This is either because I say phrases such as “I think…” or because I am talking about the way technology thinks. Both ways kind of represent what our class has been like this semester. There has been a lot of thinking without definite answers because the internet isn’t something that can be tied down and analyzed indefinitely. It is always changing like the way the mind is always changing.
- I also noticed that the word “interesting” is pretty big in the Medium wordle and I notice now, as I am typing, I keep using the word interesting to describe my findings. I need a thesaurus.
Creative Writing Blog Wordle Observations:
- Made from 3834 words from all content.
- The word “know” is the biggest word in this wordle and I think that is extremely interesting because it is commonly known that writers should always write what they know.
- To no surprise, both “abigail” and “whittington” appear quite large as well. That is because despite it being my blog, the professors I had for that class prefered that I include my name under the title anyway just to make grading easier for them.
- It was also interesting to see the word “blood” appear so big. I didn’t think I was that morbid when I wrote, but now that I think about it I guess I am.
Digital Art Blog Wordle Observations:
- Made from 3447 words from all content (except this post, obviously).
- This wordle didn’t surprise me as much. All the words that are big, I expected to be big. The only word that surprised me was the word “cool”. I probably describe art as “cool” too much and I need to start describing it in other ways.
Overall Wordle Observations:
- The word “just” is one of the more dominant words in all of the wordles.
- “Know” is also dominant in the Twitter, Facebook, and creative writing blog wordles.
- “Want” is dominating word in the Twitter and creative writing blog wordles.
- Because I made my wordles so that all the words appear horizontal, some really interesting phrases can be found. For example, “work like mom” in the Twitter wordle, “take art roommate” in the Facebook wordle, and “old abigail blood” in the creative writing blog wordle.
Since doing this project, I have become more aware of what words I use and where I use certain words most. I wish I could have compiled all of the information that I ever put onto the internet but that would be quite difficult to gather since some websites only retrieve archived information up to a certain point and some of what I contributed to the internet is lost under a pile* of new contributions to the internet.
*This internet pile I mention here and in the title of this post is refering to the internet pile of information I made for my midterm project, which was just a pile of recycled papers in a corner that represented the analog internet.
