I’m working on revising a draft of my dissertation thesis at the moment, and, on a flight of fancy, decided to see what a Wordle of my entire dissertation would look like. A Wordle is basically a pretty graphical representation of word counts in any document — the higher number of occurences for a word, the larger it appears on the Wordle (last year, I played around with my last.fm scrobbles and a book chapter in this fashion). Don’t congratulate me on finishing the diss, as I’m not done yet (still have a few weeks until turn-in of the final thesis), but it’s shaping up. If you’d like to find out more about what the topic of my dissertation is, please click here, otherwise, take a gander at the Wordle below:

[Click on the image to see a larger version]

Unsurprisingly, the word “design” dominates my dissertation — I’m scared to do a search and see exactly how many times it appears within the dissertation, but as understanding the informal design practices that players/fans of games enact online is the central focus of the diss, well, yeah, it’s not a surprise. Taking a skim over the rest, you’ll see a number of my other interests and obsessions represented: games, learning, narrative, affinity, communities, science, practices, knowledge, and, of course, Zelda, Warcraft, and Kongregate. Not to mention some specific individuals that make it into the wordle, such as Schön, Ghostcrawler and GAMEFAN (a pseudonym for one of the players I studied).

Anyway, I’m running toward the home stretch now, so this kind of thing helps me to step back and think about “what it all means.” Just a few weeks to go; wish me luck!