Oh my goodness. I can’t believe it’s June – I’m still getting used to writing “2010″ instead of “2009″! Below is a Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) generated from the beginning section of my “Methodology/Methods” chapter. As I’ve blogged before, Wordle works by generating a “word cloud” based on the frequency of words in a given text – the larger a word appears in the cloud the more frequently it was used in the original. In this Wordle, there are no real surprises for the big words that appear:

I expected”research,” “ethnography,”, “data,” “qualitative,” “researcher,” “researchers,” and “ethnographic” to appear in big, bold font. But what’s interesting is looking at the smaller words, the ones that I’ve circled in black. The fact that “may” appears at all is problematic – it signifies that I am using passive language instead of active language or past-tense. As this is a report, I should be reporting on what did occur rather than what I ‘May” have intended, or intend to do (as you would in a proposal). That “experience,” “constructivism,” “perspective,” and “life” are also teeny-tiny imply that I have not drawn enough attention to them in my text. Considering that this beginning section is all about theoretical framework, epistemology, ontology, and so on, these words should be much bigger than they are.

I intend on Wordle-ing frequently as I continue to write. I’ve found it to be a great tool for both data analysis (i.e. my research data) and for writing analysis (i.e. my reporting) because it forces me to look at the source text in a different way and brings things to the fore (literally) that I may not have thought to look at.

Plus it’s pretty :)