Reflections on Cyber_Reader Word Cloud

I’m especially curious about the arrangement of this word cloud because of the sheer number of articles that Cyber_Reader covers; rather than grouping texts thematically, the book races through some 34 articles, most edited down to a small handful of pages, and similarly races chronologically through most of the twentieth century. Generally speaking, I’m not surprised by the big words in play: artificial and human, body and machine, etc. Much of the book is devoted to exploring and deconstructing these binary systems. “Cyberspace” and “space” are two more big ones, and a lot of this emphasis follows from Gibson’s work, as does a good deal of other material on cyberspace/cybercultures.

Given Spiller’s own disciplinary orientation in (digital) architecture, I expected “architecture” to be more prominent in the cloud. But part of this architectural emphasis is also contained in terms like “space” and “environment.” What’s also interesting is the comparative smallness of “identity.” There’s a pretty noticeable shift in the book in that the later writings start to address identity more explicitly, whereas the early articles from writers like Babbage are more concerned with articulating things like machine operations and less concerned with individual human subjectivity. My theory is that identity starts to pick up steam through the course of the book, but the lack of early emphasis relegates it to a smaller role in the cloud.

The rhizome has also become a prominent theme in my readings, and the cloud extends that idea with “replication” and “multiplicity.” The spin that this particular book applies, though, seems to be one of anxiety: anxiety over the potentially infinite replication of objects through nanotechnology, for instance, as overwhelming and ultimately destructive. The numerous arguments about the multiplicity of identities also confront the same problems of desire, fluidity, and anxiety, as we consider how to locate distributed selves and distributed performances in cyberspace.

Cyber_Reader in/as Wordle

After testing out another word cloud with my responses to Critical Cyberculture Studies, I'm continuing with this method for my responses to Cyber_Reader. This book is arranged chronologically by date of original publication rather than with thematic sections, so it'll be interesting to see what themes do emerge. I'll return a bit later with some more reflections.

Reflections on Critical Cyberculture Studies Word Cloud

In a previous post, I explored some of the general themes emerging from my first usage of Wordle as an analytical/reflective reading tool. This was generated after comparing my linear, self-organized notes to Bell's An Introduction to Cybercultures with the word cloud version. I also commented on some potential strategies and affordances for thinking about and employing Wordle, more generally, as a reading-response tool.

As mentioned earlier, I took a slightly different approach with the word cloud for Critical Cyberculture Studies. Mainly, I didn't self-organize my notes into neat little bullets before throwing them into the Wordle generator. What I was going for was a more open response to the reading, perhaps even opening up new themes that I didn't consciously focus on.

To gauge how well this strategy "worked" necessarily means comparing it against other possible reading strategies and purposes for reading. There are a few obvious words in the cloud that don't exactly make for great thematic analysis but are reflective of the content (such as "Internet"). What I find more interesting are words like "design," which have led me to think "hey, this book talks a lot about design and holds a lot of web design/policy design implications." In other words, I'm unsure if I would have said "design" was a major theme if I hadn't created the cloud.

The cloud also reflects some of the key theorists and theories I had manually made categories with my original reading of Bell. Authors like Rheingold, Turkle, Foucault, and Hall made their way in there, even though I didn't consciously attempt to select key theorist names. There's also the appearance of "actor-network," which continues to intrigue me.

Another outcome I was interested in exploring was how the themes of the cloud match up with the four major sections of the book, which are "Fielding the Field," "Critical Approaches and Methods," "Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture," and "Critical Histories of the Recent Past." Key terms are represented from all of these categories: for the first, "discipline," "research," and "theory" (which also overlap heavily with the second); also for the second, "analysis" and "criteria"; for the third, "identity," "gender," "race," "masculinity," "femininity," and "diaspora"; for the fourth, "historical" and "historicize." Those are just a few, but it shows that the major organizational efforts by the editors do come through in my reading and in the word cloud. What's interesting is that the word cloud can also be read as a holistic interpretation of the entire book's themes that can point to new implications. For instance, if we take one of the bigger words, "identity," we can think about how identity plays into the cultural difference essays in terms of individual users and groups of users but also relates to the identity of an emerging academic field. One of the values of reading through word clouds, then, is a particular form of invention (a play of juxtapositions?) that provides new avenues for "seeing" and making sense of a text.

Critical Cyberculture Studies in/as Wordle

Following my reflections on Wordle thematics, I've decided to give it another go with Critical Cyberculture Studies, using a slightly different approach. Rather than summarizing a list of key themes, theorists, and terms myself and then throwing it into Wordle, I've generated a more fragmentary list of notes that reflect what I found interesting, important, etc. as I read (primarily, this reflected content from each article rather than trying to premeditate what the threads would be across articles). The cloud was generated from these notes.