Custom word clouds, or looking at my writing in a different way

In preparation to present my thesis to an audience, I felt I wanted to present some of the more synesthetic and affective aspects of the project, to find a way to present by own feelings about the novels I was working with. I was hugely inspired by Nick Sousanis, who's doing his entire dissertation as a comic.

I started playing around with the idea of using custom word clouds mix the visual with the verbal. As it turned out, choosing shapes and colors for the word clouds forced me to consider how I could represent in a visual format both the themes of the novels and my readings of them.  Although I was very interested in visual media when I was younger, it's been a long time since I've made art. Trying to use a visual form of expression (albeit one made out of words!) felt uncomfortable, but this turned out to be an important process, one that forced me to push at the limits of how I thought about own academic work.

Here I want to document the process a bit by offering one case: trying to come up with an image for my chapter on Manuel Rivas's Todo é silencio. 

I was using the site tagxedo.com, which offers a pretty flexible tool for making word clouds. In addition to controlling the fonts, orientation, and colors, you can also upload your own images and use them to shape your cloud.

I knew I wanted cool colors; I hoped to evoke a feeling of alienation. I liked the vibe that the theme "adorable blue whale" provided: a very dark blue background with letters of different values. (See here for a primer on color theory. That's what I did.) 

As for the image, I wanted to explore the idea of concentric circles to represent the idea of nested spaces I had been thinking about as I wrote the chapter. Then I came upon something I liked even better: using a labyrinth like this on found on the stones at Praia de Mogor:

I liked the connotations of the labyrinth: disorientation, seeking in circles, waves moving out from a center... Tooling around on Wikipedia, I found this tidbit:

In their cross-cultural study of signs and symbols, Patterns that Connect, Carl Schuster and Edmund Carpenter present various forms of the labyrinth and suggest various possible meanings, including not only a sacred path to the home of a sacred ancestor, but also, perhaps, a representation of the ancestor him/herself: "...many [New World] Indians who make the labyrinth regard it as a sacred symbol, a beneficial ancestor, a deity. In this they may be preserving its original meaning: the ultimate ancestor, here evoked by two continuous lines joining its twelve primary joints. (link)

Since one of the themes of the novel is the failure of transgenerational and local memory, I found Schuster and Carpenter's suggestions quite compelling.

The first attempt to create a word cloud from a photograph of the labyrinth produced this:

I loved the feeling of chaos and disintegration; the shape evoked a maelstrom, a swirling of ideas into a void that signaled the novel's coastal setting and its themes of lost memories and discourses. But when I showed this around, the feedback I got was that the visual confusion caused by the image was likely to distract viewers from the message that I would be delivering verbally as the image was being projected.

In order to make the labyrinth shape clearer, I found I couldn't use a photograph as the source shape. I needed something more graphic, like this:

I tried various manipulations, including changing the contrast and blur on the source image, and the text direction in the word cloud:

I settled on this last one, finding it the most "legible" in the dual sense of allowing the words to be legible, and also immediately recognizable as forming a labyrinth.

This is how I introduced these word clouds during the presentation:

In each of the next five slides, you will see one chapter of the body of the dissertation represented graphically by a word cloud. The words are drawn from the chapters themselves; the shapes and colors are meant to evoke the tone and thematic content of each novel.

For each chapter, I will briefly explain 1) how I use microgeographies as a reading strategy and 2) some of the ways in which my readings have led me to reflect on how individual experiences of place can be seen as nodes in networks, part of larger political and social structures.

And here's what I read as the labyrinth slide was projected:

Chapter 3 treats two nested spaces: the village of Brétema and an abandoned schoolhouse found there. As one example of the aesthetic side of microgeographic reading, I find that the chiaroscuro motif that Rivas deploys in describing the school plays into a more political question: That is: place as struggle and contestation: what kind of town (and hence world) to we want to build for ourselves. 

Another brief example: The school, as a picturesquely ruined archive of the town’s past, becomes symbolic of the political problem of the failure of local memory. At the same time, the fact that the floor of the school is a map of the world appeals to the ideals of the school’s builders, their conviction that local knowledge is part of the broader project creating a modern, cosmopolitan world.

I was concerned that the idea of using word clouds in this way was gimmicky, cheesy. And it might be. But I think that by exploring my own work through word clouds, I was able to zoom out from details of my analysis and consider the atmospherics of my project. It's strange to talk about something like a dissertation, something as dry and institutional as a digestive biscuit, as having "atmospherics". But I do think that a dissertation or a book is an aesthetic object in itself. It's also capable of giving rise to work in other media. I sure at some point I joked about performing my dissertation defense as interpretive dance; I guess in a way making these word clouds—words dancing and posing on a screen—was my gesture toward transmedial adaptation and interpretation of my academic work