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.