Narcissistic Friday post: Wordle your CV!

“Wordle”:http://www.wordle.net is a web app that takes text and turns it into word clouds. Many of you are already familiar with tag clouds — the more often the word is used the bigger it gets. My friend Jeff recently “Wordled his resume”:http://jeffmcneill.com/2008/10/28/jeff-mcneill-resume-in-wordle/ and I thought: woot ego therapy for the end of the week! So here is my CV:

Just for fun, is anyone else willing to just open their CVs, cut and paste the contents into Wordle, and see what comes out?

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

16 thoughts on “Narcissistic Friday post: Wordle your CV!

  1. Also, I love how, through coincidence of title and such, my wordle strongly pairs the words “dissertation” and “good” – if only my committee had felt the same way…

  2. Here’s a three I did based on the abstract and the first chapter of my dissertation. It is fun:

    http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/51979/Lisu_Marriage_and_Bridewealth

    http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/51937/Lisu_kinship

    http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/51948/Lisu_dissertation_abstract

    As I put in the caption for this on my blog — can you guess what my topic and conclusions were from this?

    it’s very amusing. BTW, for a lovely interactive 3-D thesaurus, check out http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

  3. And, BTW, note the juxtaposition of imaginary, husbands, and wealth in Lisu kinship; and bridewealth and opium in Lisu Marriage & Bridewealth.

    Adam, from your wordle, I’d like your dissertation!

  4. I did a post a while back on using wordle pedagogically:

    http://carldyke.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/wordle-pedagogy/

    Because I get so many papers that read like wordles anyway, the idea was to have students wordle drafts of their first paragraphs, exchange them, and see how much of each other’s meaning they could reconstruct. I thought it would be a good way to dramatize the difference between a coherent thought and a pile of words (or a culture and a pile of artifacts, I guess).

    I did try it this semester (I actually started the term by handing out a wordle of the syllabus, so there was some foundation) and found the exercise promising. The students were more bemused than edified, but they enjoyed it in a funhouse-mirror kind of way. Any thoughts about how to improve the strategy?

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