A Wordle of this!

At Uscreates, we’ve been using Wordle as a tool to analyse both websites and content, and it’s been proving very useful. What Wordle does is create a hierarchical visualisation of a website or any piece of text by making the words with the highest occurrence largest, and those with the fewest smallest. Simple.

I decided to create a Wordle of this blog and this is what came out!

What I like about the results is that Participant and Participants are massive! This is great because I really want my research to be participatory, a joint collaboration between all the parties involved, and I guess a lot of my writing is focusing on that. Some other great results are:

Lebanon – Of course my case study

Methods – Of course because it’s a practice-led research

Different – I love this one, because that’s the main problem I am trying to tackle; how can I design things that help ‘different’ people integrate?

Dialogue – Great, it’s a social integration method

Social/people – At the heart of the research

Visual – Looking at the problem from the perspective of how visual methods, communications contribute

Camp, Explorations, Probe – Of course, my latest fieldwork

Now what is slightly worrying is how small Communication and Design are, when these are the first two words in the PhD title! I know that I am now at the scoping/insight stage, and have not started developing any communication design yet, but I still need to boost my reading and writing in this area. A definite task for the near future.

I can start seeing how Wordle can help me map my literature review, and the best part is it only takes seconds!

Synthesis

I decided to create the ‘My Struggles’ category as a documentation of the barriers I face throughout the research. I don’t want to sound very somber, so I will, in correlation, create a contrasting category, ‘My Triumphs’, which will document the stages where I have overcome previous struggles or other key turning points in my research.

So here is my main struggle, which sounds more like a question:

Why is it that I can enthusiastically read and surf and watch and learn during my research – which I will call the assimilation stage – but when it actually comes down to writing and summarising and analysing and evaluating – the synthesis stage – I will worry and procastinate endlessly? I also realised that although sometimes the procastination may last 2 weeks or more, when I eventually do sit down and synthesise the information, it would only take me a few hours. Did these 2 weeks of procastination prepare me ‘subconsciously’ for the synthesis stage? Or is it possible to just discipline myself, sit down and do it straight away with no procastination and still get the same results?