With the amount of information available to us these days via the internet and traditional means (books, newspapers, film, etc), it can be overwhelming to try to absorb any of it, let alone a useful amount. When people discuss terabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes worth of data, your average person will have no means to comprehend the enormity of the available information. According to Mark Wattenberg, in an interview he did with Wired magazine, the total number of words a human will hear in a lifetime will be less than a terabyte of data.
An increasingly-popular way to quickly analyse text is by using word clouds (or tag clouds). Common words are shown in a larger font, and rarer words in a smaller font. It’s a quick way to see which words or tags are reoccurring or barely used in a block of text or on a website. Bloggers are using them to quickly display the most common topics covered in their posts.
I think it would be interesting to see how they can be used in learning, perhaps to track progress of learned words, or patterns in writing. Or look at foreign language media to see which common words would be the most useful to learn. Granted, I may just be being creative with suggestions because I really like graphics, but I think they’re worth playing around with.
Another interesting thing that Many Eyes have made easily available is the word tree. You can select a word and then see the relationships it has with words or punctuation following it. Following the pathways can be quite interesting.
Below are a couple of examples that I’ve done using the text from this blog. Wordle makes it really easy to make word trees, using either text or a URL that contains an Atom or RSS feed (perfect for making clouds from blogs). Click on the word cloud for a bigger view, and click on the word tree to visit the interactive version so you can play around with it yourself.
January 27, 2009 at 10:51 am
· Filed under Games, Unspoken · Posted by Wendy
As it’s my birthday, I thought we could widen our viewpoint on language and communication, and look at something that combines audio input and visual output to create something potentially beautiful. It’s also fun and may make people think you’re a crazy person.
Ze Frank has invented a drawing tool that is controlled by volume input from your microphone. A low volume turns anticlockwise, a medium volume draws a straight(ish) line, and a high volume turns the line clockwise. It’s kind of like a vocal Etch A Sketch. I was never very good at those, either.
This is one of Ze’s, as mine are ‘abstract’ at best.
In China, and many other Asian countries, it’s the buildup to the new year (according to the lunar calendar). The upcoming year is the Year of the Ox (or Bull or Buffalo), and it starts on January 26.
The Chinese are all about puns and double entendres, as the restricted number of syllable sounds makes for a lot of words that sound like each other (despite the tonal differences, which aren’t very noticeable to the uninitiated).
One of my favourites so far combines the festive season, cows, Chinese, and English. The word for ‘cow’ (or ox) in Chinese is niu. It sounds a lot like the English word ‘new’. Therefore, imagine my delight when I first saw what I’m about to wish you.
One year ago today, an 89 year old woman died in Alaska.
This may not seem remarkable at first glance, but when she died, she took with her an entire language. Chief Marie Smith Jones was a chief of the native Eyak tribe in Alaska, was the last full-blooded Eyak, and was the last native speaker of their language.
Like many tribal languages, Eyak was only spoken in a limited geographical region, amongst people of the same tribe. With the encroachment of other tribal cultures, and the spread of English through North America, it is no surprise that usage of the language would diminish in time.
Foreseeing the extinction of the language, Chief Marie worked with linguist Dr. Michael Krauss for over forty years in an effort to keep the language alive.
Linguistic and cultural extinction doesn’t get as much media attention as environmental extinction (of endangered species, for example), but it doesn’t mean it’s any less tragic. Of course, there are two sides to this argument, with some people believing that globalisation and the creation of an international lingua franca is not only inevitable, but beneficial, as easier communication will be facilitated.
I’m not sure where I sit on that scale, but I know that there’s something poignant about seeing the last of anything disappear from the earth.
You may know that I was pretty happy about Senator Obama becoming President-Elect Obama.
On the eve of his historic inauguration, I hope that displays of this sort will become rarer in the future (is it just me, or did someone prepare these labels just to take advantage of every time they saw a bilingual sign?).
It might be naive of me, and things may well get worse before they get better, but I hope that tolerance for other languages and cultures will increase over the next few years, especially in the United States.
An interesting video from the Pearson Foundation about incorporating technology and real life input into effective learning strategies. It is mostly addressing children’s education, but it’s gratifying to see people so passionate about teaching real skills, not just textbook answers. It’s nice to have reminders that we can learn anywhere, from anything, and education doesn’t have to be restricted to the traditional classroom setting.
Recently there seems to be a trend on social networking sites (e.g. Facebook) to provide content in other languages. This is all well and good, for distinct languages. However, I’m not sure that differentiating between English (US) and English (UK) on websites is entirely necessary. I mean, an excessive amount of z’s and lack of u’s makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes, but I still know what they’re trying to tell me. When I got a message asking me to ‘help translate Facebook into English (UK)’, it seemed more than a tad unnecessary.
For the last couple of months, every time I log in to YouTube, it shows me the same message, asking if I would like to view the site in English (UK). No matter how many times I click ‘OK’, or change the settings, it still gives me the same question next time. No matter if I’m in English (US) or English (UK), it still just says ‘English’ up the top. I also get the option to ‘view the site in English’, or clicking to ‘show message in English’.
I’m not sure which English they mean….
In semi-related news, apparently to change the language you receive notifications in, you have to change your current location to a country which speaks the language you require. That seems ridiculous.
January 10, 2009 at 4:02 am
· Filed under Pop Culture · Posted by Wendy
The ultimate computer peripheral for word nerds. Never again will you forget how much that Q is worth! Although, if you are like a friend of mine who knows every two-letter word accepted by whichever official dictionary we’re playing with, then this is probably the least of your concerns.
In any case, this hand-beveled Scrabble keyboard is a bit too boxy for my tastes, but I can’t argue that it’s a thing of board game beauty. And evidence of a lot of time expended.
January 7, 2009 at 12:14 pm
· Filed under Uncategorized · Posted by Wendy
Are you sick of reading comments on the internet that you need to take time out to translate, only to find out that it wasn’t worth it in the first place? Me too!
Sister Salad have done a great cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s classic Baby Got Back, entitled Yo Comments Are Whack. I think it should be Yo’ Comments Are Whack, but that’s neither here nor there.
An excerpt:
We’re tired of starin’ at the screen,
Tryin’ to figure out what you mean.
Take a couple seconds to end your sentence,
So you won’t sound thirteen.
So haters! (Yeah) Haters! (Yeah!)
Do your comments need translators? (Yeah!)
Then punctuate. Capitalize.
It makes a difference, guys!
Yo comments are whack.
I’ve been working on an English pronunciation project recently, and we came up against the age-old (well, not really) question of American (AmE*) vs British (BrE*) English pronunciation. This particular project is required to use BrE, and the standard UK IPA symbols. I realised that if and when I need to create an AmE version, I will need to use a different set of phonetic symbols (notably for vowels), and teach some words in completely different ways. For example, AmE doesn’t really use the sound /ɔ:/ (the first syllable in the British ‘water’), but pronounces a whole lot more r’s than its British counterpart.
This led me to the question of choosing an accent. When you’re about to learn a new language, do you consider which dialect or accent you will be picking up, and will it matter in the future? Can the complete beginner even tell the difference? If you are learning English, should you pick a North American, European, or even Australasian accent? Apparently Canadian is the easiest to understand. If you’re learning French, do you want to speak like a Parisian or a Montrealer?
I know that when I was trying to improve my Cantonese, I preferred a Hong Kong accent to a country accent, and similarly I would rather have a Beijing or Shanghai accent than that of a small town that nobody’s ever heard of.
Of course this may sound like snobbery, but it basically boils down to increasing your chances of being understood. If you do your best to emulate a standard accent, people will be much more likely to understand you. I don’t think it matters if you choose American or British English, or American or European Spanish, as long as you try to learn a dialect that is commonly understood. If you go to a village an learn their particular accent and dialect, not only will you be an anomaly, but it will be much less likely that you will achieve the goal of learning a language – communication.
So if you’re making this sort of decision – just pick an accent and run with it.
*To prevent confusion, I am using American English to mean the standard or General American (GA) accent, and British English to mean a standard accent from England, sometimes referred to as BBC English or Received Pronunciation (RP). Not many people actually speak with either of these accents, but they are taken as a frame of reference. Please don’t leave me angry comments about how I should just call it English. English English is too confusing a term to use. As is Spanish Spanish.
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