Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Tag Cloud of this Blog



created at TagCrowd.com




So this is the tag cloud of my blog. Sara introduced me to tag clouds, when she did one on tagcrowd.com of all of our tags from the StoneLake Farm trip. A tag cloud is basically a summary of a group of words, in this case just all of the most used words in my entire blog. The larger the word in the cloud, the more often it was used in the blog up to this point. Looking at this tag cloud is special to me, because it's like a little summary of this past semester, a great semester, which also happens to be my last one in college.

I love how "people" is in the largest font, the only word of its size in the cloud. This reflects my interest and passion in life- the way people interact, what affects people, how people can be moved to change, connecting people, the idea that people need people, what makes people feel the way they do...and I'm looking forward to living the rest of my life meeting and connecting with new types of people all the time.

Also, this semester in the Davies Forum (the reason for which this blog began, but not the reason for which it will continue) has been all about interacting with and learning from and with different people. The outline for the Davies Forum, with one different guest speaker every week to learn new things from, is a big reason this could happen.

It's also quite nice how the cloud begins with "artist" and ends with "world." I think of myself as an artist, I think more people should think of themselves as artists (maybe it's like Scott McCloud says in his book Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art, "art is any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction") and I also think about myself as a part of this world! It's like the cloud represents my path in life right now: OK artist, interact with people, learn from them and affect them, the world is waiting and ready!"

I think I also just realized right now from looking at this tag cloud what the Davies Forum on Digital Literacy was all about. I don't think it's really explainable in a paragraph or classic sentence form, which is probably why I think we were all a little confused about what this class was supposed to be, what exactly digital literacy is, until after it all happened. I wonder what I would have thought if I had seen this cloud before taking the class.

Visit these other blogs for more thoughts/explanations/summaries on digital literacy:
Lulu's User friendly Guide to San Francisco
Sara's Studies
Shiny Things
LostintheFogSF
Silver in SF
Stay with the Soft
Digitizing Dreams and Waking Life
and also check out our flickr doings

1 comment:

Sara said...

Another Davies Scholar with "people" at the top of the list! Amber reminded me that she and I shared that as a most-used word, and now you get to join the club. Woot!