Wordling Scrobbles & Zeldas

This has been a particularly blah, grey, rainy morning, so I’ve spent more time than usual poking around blogs and cleaning out my Google Reader. Oh, before I forget, here’s another plug for my shared items from Google Reader — this, and my Twitter, are really my “blogs” these days (serving up links to things I find interesting, as well as daily blab about goings-on in my life). If you use Google Reader (if you aren’t, you should!) and read my blog, give me a holler. I’m always interested in reading what other people are sharing and, to date, only 3 or 4 of my friends regularly do this, so I’m itchin’ for more to read.

(By the way, does anyone have any advice on how to incorporate the Google shared stuff, including my comments into an existing blog template? There’s an RSS for those shared items, but not one which includes my comments that I can find. And, well, I think people should have to hear my amazing insights on other people’s posts about videogames to SNL to bathroom tiling. That’s what the Internet’s for, right?)

Anyway, one thing I stumbled across on Google Reader this morning was a recent post by Scott Westerfeld (author of the excellent So Yesterday that I posted about recently, as well as the Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras books that Liz is currently reading). A few months ago, people were going nuts over wordle.net (a Java app which does word counts for any block of text and visualizes them), and I missed it. Scott decided to take the list of artists from his entire iTunes library, and dump it into Wordle. Pretty cool and fun, and Scott’s experiment is documented here.

I followed his instructions, however, and it turns out that simply dumping all the info from iTunes can be terribly misleading if you have a ton of stuff in your iTunes library that you never, ever listen to. I was sort of shocked that “Nintendo” was the most frequent word in my iTunes library, probably because of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and other soundtracks I’ve got in there which I rarely play. I thought of an alternative, using the music I actually listen to, and decided to Wordle my Last.fm music — basically, all of the music I’ve played via iTunes, my iPods and iPhone for the past 3 years (or however long it’s been since I started audioscrobbling). In particular, I chose to dump in the list of tracks I’ve listened to rather than just the artists (so Wordle could actually build up counts of individual artists). Like Westerfeld, I had to trim out a few words (”play,” “track,” and “full” all showed up as very common, so I did selective searches and replaces). Here’s what it turned out as (apologies for the tiny thumbnail, but that’s what Wordle gave me):

I really like how it broke up the names of multi-word artists, and it highlights that I have listened to a hell of a lot of Ennio Morricone and Yo La Tengo over the years (not to mention the soundtrack to Shaun of the Dead). I have an old dude’s musical tastes, but whatever, I’m old.

Oh, and it makes a decent desktop wallpaper, no? I decided to make a plain black and white sans-serif version for my laptop:

[Click to enlarge]

Additionally, just for kicks, I decided to throw in all the text of the book chapter that Jim Gee and I wrote — which is about to be published any day now, just checked the proofs last week! The chapter is entitled “The Hero of Timelines: Argumentation and Epistemology in Zelda Chronology Debates” and it’s going to be in The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy (Ed., Luke Cuddy) sometime this Fall. Here’s a Wordle for our chapter:

Unsurprisingly, “Zelda” is the biggest word on the map, with “game” and “games” pretty close behind. “Evidence” interestingly shows up big, as does “legendary” — we make a big deal in the chapter about the ways fans of the Zelda games use bits of narrative from the games as evidence to develop theories about the games’ overarching timelines. In particular, we pull out an example of a debate over the meaning of the term “legendary,” so this all makes sense. (If you’re interested in the paper, by the way, I have put a PDF of it on the site for anyone’s perusal).

Anyway, enough Wordling for now!