Reflections on The Cybercultures Reader Word Cloud

The word cloud I've generated on The Cybercultures Reader has the most ground to cover in terms of sheer content; the anthology contains 44 chapters and 787 pages. I thought that this might result in the themes being more rhizomatic and less centralized around a few key terms, but it appears that, generally speaking, the same word cloud structure has emerged here. The "foundational" cyberculture studies topics of identity and communities are represented among the larger words, and there is also a significant emphasis on the cyborg (especially as formulated in Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"). I'm a little surprised by how big "human" is, but there are multiple book sections that engage directly with questions of the human (Cyberbodies, Cyberlife, and Beyond Cybercultures are probably the most directly related).

As in the word cloud for Critical Cyberculture Studies, the thematic organization of the book as determined by the editors also shows up here, with terms such as "feminism," "political," "A-Life," "bodies," and "posthuman" appearing. The "Popular Cybercultures" section gets a little buried, and I suspect that's mostly due to its focus on individual pop culture artifacts (such as comic books and Lara Croft's media franchise). However, "cyborg," "media," and "identity" do get at the core issues of that section, even if the specific artifacts aren't as well represented.

As I discussed earlier, I think there's potential for word cloud generation to unpack some of the "hidden themes" of a text: themes that are not selectively foregrounded by the editors or individual authors, in other words. However, in my case, it's as much a question of what I'm selectively recording as much as what actually shows up repeatedly in the text (and also how I interpret it). I tried to maintain as much balance and accuracy as I could, but of course it's a subjective process. I did notice that themes like "surveillance" were popping up in places that I might not have initially expected (before reading, I might have attributed "surveillance" primarily to the Cyberpolitics section). It would be interesting (if work-intensive) to do a section-by-section breakdown and compare word clouds across sections along with the overall cloud. It'd also be cool to compare across readers and see what kinds of coding and interpretation were going on as people read.