Not Real Work...

Friends and family and acquaintances ask me from time to time what it is I'm working on, and I find from time to time that I go on far too long discussing the very fine nuances of what I'm up to. It's a dissertation, after all. I can explain it short ("Nature and Text") or I can explain it long (Please see final dissertation copy, due on file at LSU in January 2010).

But I've found a way to do a pretty easy and fun shorthand: graphic word clouds of my writing. This program selects out the words I use most in the work I'm doing, and arranges them in little clusters, with the most frequently-used terms in the biggest type.

Here, for example, is what my prospectus looked like (it's changed since then. A lot. I'm not going to go into how):












Here's a draft chapter I did on Deep Ecology:












Here's a cloud for some work I'm doing on Thoreau:












Here's some work I'm doing on John Wesley Powell and Deleuze:













Last ones. An article I wrote on Kant and the commodification of the sublime in wilderness:












And an article I'm working on about Marx, Nietzsche and Badiou and their ethical (horrors!) response to Callicles's challenge in the Gorgias:











There. That should clear it all up.

Now: back to work generating more of this kind of thing.