Posted by Danny on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Dad was a devotee of computers probably minutes after discovering them as an undergraduate at Waterloo in the 70s. He repeatedly tried to instil the same wonder and excitement in me, groping for ways to connect the nature of computing machines to my own interests and probably disappointingly artsy foci—anything, at least, to extend their significance beyond the video games I was playing. One of the early uses, I learned, was for academics studying literature to compute word frequencies in texts, which was for me at once a completely novel idea, and seemed spectacularly boring and pointless.[1]
I hadn’t thought much about it until “tag clouds” started popping up on popular sites and the possibilities of this kind of data visualisation started revealing themselves despite my benightment. Recently, Geoff brought Wordle to my attention. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Monday, March 2, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I am subject to a socially-debilitating frisson whereby my inner narrative slows and distends: queued sentences fall into clauses, then words, then morphemes, and then sometimes, constituent letters (though this last happens with increasing scarcity as the incursion of spell-checking software further and further into my patterns of composition is eroding my orthographical confidence). The outward manifestation of this phenomenon is that I have lost my train of thought, perhaps because I have been speaking ex-proctologically (this is not always never the case), but witnesses concerned for my cognitive acuity and fitness may be cheerfully reassured that I am even then merely in the throes of a kind of lexophilic masturbation which involves them only peripherally at best. My frisson culminates in the spontaneous synthesis of long forgotten, or at least hitherto dissociated, etymological data into a personally novel insight regarding the use, significance, and varying aptness of a commonly invoked word I had been presently planning to deploy. Naturally, by the time I have sanitised and condensed my epiphany into a generally edible product, its sovereign relevance to the conversation has waned and I wind up looking like a weirdo. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 