Wyoming Humanities Network

So after I blogged about Capitol Words, I got curious. Surely Congress’s words aren’t the only ones being tracked!

Sure enough, twistori and Visible Tweets are keeping up-to the moment tabs on what people are twittering about. At Visible Tweets, you can plug in a word — or a phrase, your name, whatever — and any recent tweets that include that word will slowly form and disintegrate and reform on your computer screen. It’s quite lovely to watch, and it’s interesting to see what place, say, “Wyoming” has in the online conversation right now. (In case you’re curious, my two favorite Wyoming tweets for today are “i just saw camels… in wyoming” and “6:20 in Jackson, Wyoming seems a lot earlier than I thought it would at midnight.”)

twistori has, well, a little different twist. You can select one of six words: love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish. twistori then scrolls tweets that include those words up the screen. It moves a lot faster than Visible Tweets, which I personally don’t like as well, but multiple tweets on the screen provide opportunities for funny juxtapositions, like “i feel bad about this, but cats totally creep me out” and “i feel like i dreamed about cats?” Sometimes watching the tweets on these sites is a sad reminder of how little we do with language, but sometimes it really does offer a glimpse into which topics are on the minds and keyboards of a lot of different people.

Another fun way to take the pulse of  online communities is We Feel Fine, which culls blogs from all over the world every ten minutes for sentences about how the bloggers feel. We Feel Fine then cross indexes the feeling with the blogger’s location, age, sex, weather, and date. Each sentence is represented as a colorful dot or square in a swirl of other “feelings.” We Feel Fine is searchable, so if you want to know how Wyoming bloggers felt in July, you can. If you want to know how many Canadians feel “vague” when it’s rainy as opposed to sunny, you can. If a sentence really catches your eye, you can click through to that blog. They make no promises about being the least bit scientific, but it is interesting to see how bloggers are representing themselves, both close to home and far away.

While we’re on the topic of word frequency, it seems fitting to mention Wordle, an online tool that generates word clouds that visibly demonstrate the frequency of all the words in a text. Cut and paste or type in a selection of text or a blog URL, and Wordle will create a word cloud for you, in which the sizes of the words vary from huge (frequently used words) to tiny (seldom used words). I generated a word cloud for this blog; it’s up at the top of this post!