Wordle made this summary – it is such a cool app, go and have a play with it! You can paste in any amount of text (some people have done whole books) or give it a del.icio.us URL and it’ll analyse the tags.
So what’s this Wordle cloud about? As part of my library qualification I wrote a dissertation about… well… you can get quite a decent idea of it from this visualisation! It looked at the possibility of using distributed classification (i.e. tagging) to describe the affective (mood and emotion) content of pop music. For it to be a feasible method I felt it had to have a degree of consistency, hence that word’s size in the summary. To massively over-simplify, I found that there was a degree of consistency: enough to merit further work.
Unfortunately I haven’t yet disseminated these results widely because my supervisor was keen for me to edit the dissertation into a journal article and get published ‘properly’ (under my own name – she wasn’t pushing me for the sake of her own RAE score!). Unfortunately I am not very motivated to do this (I have no ambitions of a academic career) with the result that I’ve been sitting on it for the best part of two years. Perhaps I should just release the PDF onto the web and let the fruits of my endeavours roam free…
Multi-faceted 