Tag: clouds

Clouds to the Left of Me, Clouds to the Right

/ Derek Mueller

Cloud Parallax

Finished fine-tuning my cloud-parallactic contribution to a roundtable at the CCCC in Atlanta later this week. We forecasters are predicting a sitting-room (i.e., entire row to yourself?) crowd for N.30 session, 12:30-1:45 p.m. on Saturday. As for the fine-tuning, I’m pleased enough with the changes, and I had to work especially hard to resist incorporating more than a cliche or two from Stealers Wheel, e.g., “Trying to make some science of it all, but I can see it makes no science at all.” Yes, the paper is–it’s hard to believe–better because I axed a half-dozen lines like this from it.

And in case you can’t make it to N.30, maybe because you are at the Braves-Phillies game, the good news is that we can catch up on Thursday in the poster galleria, Room M301, Marquis Level, between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., where I’ll be standing quietly next to my first ever attempt at an academic poster. For the full poster experience, it’s best if you pre-install a QR code-scanning app on your mobile device.

Cirrus Uncinus

/ Derek Mueller

Because some flaws are more glaring when the paint is fresh, before it has dried.

The first word of chapter three’s draft: in. The last word: hence. The last word winks at me and smiles. Why? I don’t use the word “hence” often. We both know it is not the last word but instead the word that comes–for now–at the end.

I thought I would use something from Everything Is Miscellaneous (Weinberger) or Ambient Findability (Morville), but I have not. They are relievers–back-ups for coming revisions.

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Address Keywords

/ Derek Mueller

How best to arrive at keywords (before they are tags)? One humorless punchline is that I will not soon have a degree in computational linguistics. I have dealt
superficially with the question this week, first by thinking about the relationship
of the terms assigned by various methods–where we have keywords at all, that
is. The most prominent journals in composition studies do very little with
keywords, much less with tags (here I am thinking of tags as the digital
iteration of keywords that includes latent, descriptive, and procedural
labeling). Why is that?

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Clouds, Graphs, Maps

/ Derek Mueller

A couple of days ago Mike posted notes on
my

CCCC talk from late last month, and I was reminded that I’m at least ten days
past due on the video
I said I would
produce following the conference.

I recorded the talk to an mp3 yesterday afternoon and went to
campus last night where I planned to use iMovie to sync the audio with jpegs of
the slides. Because the slideshow includes text, I needed to get the
resolution right, but, well, it started to get late. I started to get impatient.
I was able to output a reasonably readable mp4 file, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get
Google Video or
Daily Motion to encode it.
Finally Jumpcut accepted the file, so it’s
available below the fold (even if much of it suffers from jaggies). The original mp4 is available for download
here.

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And Returns

/ Derek Mueller

Ph. and I whistled into the Syracuse train depot yesterday afternoon; we’re
home from the excursion to the conference. Everything is unpacked,
laundered, put away.

I have plans to put the paper to an mp3 and sync it with the slides. I
can do this, of course, because my talk was scripted. It’s endlessly
reproducible as a result. But recording will have to wait until I shake off the
cough-inducing tickle that has been getting the best of me all day today.
Sure, I could delete out any of the hacking and rattling that makes its way into
the mix, but why? I’ll just wait it out.

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Cloudifying Exams

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

Because I have a hearing/defense coming up Thursday morning for my qualifying exams, I figured why not run the answers for the most frequent nouns and noun phrases? And then I figured, why not post each answer as a tagcloud?

I’ve re-read my exam answers to prepare for each of the meetings with members of my committee over the past few days. Re-connecting with the answers has been unsurprising; I mean that the answers were what I remembered them to be. Their arguments, for better and worse, are still fresh with me. Still, the tagcloud gives me another perspective. A different bi-product.

I don’t have a whole lot more to say about the questions I anticipate or the steps I’m taking to defend myself my answers. Just saying that because I have the CSS built to handle it, I’m enamored of posting more vaporous gatherings, beginning with these.

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Tag Brick

/ Derek Mueller

I went ahead and pulled the tag cloud from the right-hand column this
morning.  It worked fine for a few months
last fall,
but for several weeks now the tags have ceded their cloudiness, freezing instead on the set you see
here, many of which come from Ph.’s FR basketball schedule.  His season
ended two weeks ago. 

I returned to the Tagcloud
site, saw the latest news headline from 65 days ago: "TagCloud
Continues to Grow." On an apathetic whim, I sent in a troubleshooting note: "What the hay’s
going on with my cloud?"  But I haven’t heard anything back. 
Maybe one of these days I’ll look into a plugin that will allow me to do
something similar. 

TagCloud

/ Derek Mueller


TagCloud (beta)

TagCloud (beta)
returns keywords and phrases from a collection of RSS feeds.  I have yet to
dig very far into their methods for arriving at the set of keywords from the set
of feeds, but for a first run, it yielded a tag-set that accords fairly well
with the feed.  Just to experiment, I’ve posted a cloud in the right
sidebar; for now, it draws on the atom feed for this weblog alone. A cloud (this
one or a second one) might draw on a set of feeds from comp/rhet bloggers,
general news feeds, or any other collection worth glancing into periodically.

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