Cloudy, with a chance of vectors

Early on in the Thought Vectors experience someone whose name I don’t remember wordled Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think. I do remember that I thought it was interesting to muse upon what you could pull out of the word cloud. This morning I saw that Christina Engelbart had posted a word cloud of Doug Engelbart’s article,  Augmenting Human Intellect. Since I have yet to read the article, I’m not sure if I can or should try to make anything of the image. But one thing that struck me about it was the repetition of words – process and processes, structure and structuring. Apparently Wordle doesn’t have a stemming function. I discovered that Tagxedo, another word cloud generator, does do stemming, so I ran the article through it. The first thing I noticed was that I don’t like Tagxedo’s fonts. There’s a button to change them, but none of the options that came up were appealing. The word computer seems to have disappeared, which is strange. Maybe the program regards it as a common word and filtered it out. Development is much more prominent, and symbol stands out a little more. I see a sentence in it: Augmentation means structure. It seems like an idea worth exploring, but I should read through the article first.