Facilitating Change

I love visualizations. Especially of networks and other data. My (signed!) Edward Tufte books are one of my prized possessions. One of my favorite websites is Visual Complexity. So beautiful. Ironically I don’t go there often. Too dangerous. Can’t get out for hours. Look:

Visualization is powerful because it gives you a different perspective. Which helps you think differently. I like to tell my friends that I’ve figured out what enlightenment is: It’s the ability to see all different perspectives simultaneously. Imagine that. Of course I’m not able to do it. Apparently I’m struggling with a gap between theory and practice.

Come to think of it good communications practice — to persuade, for social change — is at its core about providing a different perspective in a way that others can receive and act on it. There are lots of ways to do that, from good ol’ one-way broadcast to a collaborative approach, where the focus is on engagement, conversation, and creating together.

Okay so back to Wordle. It’s “toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

Pretty nice, huh? You can generate your image from a text, a blog, or a Delicious account. I put in this blog. Didn’t turn out so good. “Chopped” and “Pasta” are the biggest words. So clearly it’s fixating on my Spaghetti alla Puttanesca post. Not that I blame it. That is one wicked recipe.

So instead I put in my Delicious account. (I love Delicious. To find great leads you can go to the “popular” section and type in any tag. For example, here’s what’s hot for infrastructure.) When I saw the results I thought “yeah, that’s right.” Uh… but I don’t feel enlightened. Just a nagging feeling that I need to tidy up my tags ;)

Click on image to see it bigger.