Word Cloud Video Tour (.txt version)

[Video: text on screen reads “Word Cloud Video Tour”; transition to green screen footage of Jason standing in front of word cloud screencapture, intercut with footage of clouds, and illustrations of a unicorn, a dragon, and a magic lantern]

Jason: Hello campers! We’re in for a cloudy day in English Journal Land—a word cloudy day! We’ll be tracking historical weather—er, I mean word frequency trends in English Journal on a decade-by-decade basis. You can click through the decades by using the handy arrows on the left and the right side. When you stare at a cloud long enough, you can start to see some intriguing patterns embedded in it, from unicorns to dragons to magic lanterns. In this screencast, we’re going to tell you just a few of the stories that we found when we kept our heads up in the clouds. Join us, will you?

[Audio: harp transition]
[Video: transition to screencast with inset video of Jason and (intermittently) Ben; screen activity described in narration throughout]

Jason: So we’re starting here, 1912 to 1929. We had a little larger time span just because there were so few articles there, and it didn’t start at an even decade. Anyway, what really pops out to me here is the word “illustration” and the word “picture.” So in this time period there was a lot of interest in visual instruction, especially brought on by the rise of various slide projector technologies which we can see here. And most of this use of visual tools was really about supporting the teaching of literature and reading—making literature come alive for students with pictures. Especially British literature, which we can see here with “England” and “London” featuring so prominently.

Ben: I’m kind of drawn in by some of the smaller words. What’s going on right above “picture” there?

Jason: Oh! “Cents.” You know, I think that might be because so many of these articles were lists of instructional materials that you could order, and things were really cheap back then. All right, let’s take a look at the thirties. Boom! “Radio.” Radio comes in in a really big way, and something that I noticed when that happens is the teaching of reading is still really prominent, but look: “writing.” It barely registered before, but now it’s much more prominent, and this is because teachers were really invested in having students write and perform radio scripts. But it wasn’t just radio scripts. Sure, “picture” is big here, but things have changed. Picture is associated with “motion,” with “film,” so the motion picture, the film, the movie. And the students were also writing scripts for these media as well.

Ben: Another thing I noticed here is this outdated term “photoplay” at the very top.

Jason: Oh, photoplay!

Ben: Yeah, it’s kind of like whenever a new medium emerges, we’re trying to figure out what to actually call the thing—that one didn’t win.

Jason: It didn’t win, but it also says something about English teachers were like, “Okay, we can deal with film because it relates to our historic investment in drama.” So we definitely see remediation at work in a kind of fun and quaint way. So on to the 1940s. Not much new to see here really. “Radio” and “film” are still holding strong. There’s still the interest in the “motion picture” as well. We definitely see “reading” is still dominant, but there’s quite a bit of interest in “writing” as well. On to the fifties, shall we? So in the fifties, boom! “Television”—we haven’t seen that before. It dominates this word cloud in a really big way, and we see “radio” has gotten a lot smaller, so I’m starting to wonder if television really will kill the radio star after all. “Film”—film’s over here still holding its own very much.

Ben: One of the things I noticed is that we start to see a marked shift in the relationship between reading and writing. “Writing” becomes very tiny in the fifties.

Jason: Wait, where’s writing?

Ben: Right above television.

Jason: Oh!

Ben: And I wonder what that’s about.

Jason: That’s super tiny. You know, I wonder if that has something to do with the decline of radio, because there was all that interest in sort of radio scripting, and as you remember, teachers were a little bit more critical of television and how it was taking away from reading, and there was just a greater focus on sort of reading and analysis there maybe.

Ben: Definitely.

Jason: All right, let’s go on to the sixties—one of my favorite decades. So “television” is still here, still strong. “Radio”—I’m scanning all the way around . . . yeah, radio’s gone—

Ben: But there is “tape” right under “program.”

Jason: Yeah, “tape.” So, and I think that suggests “audiotape.” So there’s still an interest in audio. And while we’re looking at the little words—boom!—‟computer.” There are people writing about computers in English Journal in the 1960s in the very earliest days of humanities computing.

Ben: Like literally four or five articles.

Jason: And you know, something that makes me happy is we saw “writing” get demolished in the fifties, but here it’s back together again with “reading” and, you know, relatively equal size and I think that’s pretty cool.

Ben: One other thing. Look what’s right above the word “new” all the way to the right.

Jason: Oh yeah! “Composition.” So I think this might explain part of the reason why writing’s back. In 1963, a watershed moment, you know on our way to developing a discipline dedicated to writing instruction. You know, maybe there was an impact, who knows? So now we’re here in the 1970s, the grooviest decade. So I’ve noticed that “television” and “film” are definitely still holding their own. Something that makes me super happy is that it’s kind of small, but radio’s back. It didn’t die after all. It’s holding on. Something that really strikes me though is we have a new word emerge that we haven’t seen before in these clouds. “Media.” Right there, big, hot pink, McLuhanesque.

Ben: One thing I noticed in conjunction with media, perhaps even an extension of this growing way of thinking about using media in the classroom, these smaller words like “art” or “music,” or over here on the end, “sound,” “visual,” up at the very top, “game.” Suddenly teachers are a lot more interested in experimenting with these forms or genres and types of text, if you will, that they haven’t been playing with before.

Jason: Whoa! So here we are in the eighties, “computer”—BAM!

Ben: Incidentally in the seventies, computer didn’t even show up.

Jason: Yeah it didn’t. I mean, I’m looking here for it, it’s not there. But here we get to the eighties, and it’s huge. And something that I noticed too is that it’s associated so clearly with writing. And “writing” here is so much larger than “reading,” and that’s also the first time that we’ve seen that in these clouds so far.

Ben: Right. I wouldn’t be so quick to directly correlate them, although I think that’s absolutely a defensible claim. Look at the word “process” right above “computer.” Many of those references in the corpus are to the emergence of process pedagogy. So in conjunction with this new technology that comes on the scene in the form of the personal computer, you also have a really friendly pedagogy that kind of aligns really nicely with it and helps promote writing.

Jason: Yeah I think we always see how pedagogy and technology work together. I also just think it’s worth noticing even though we’re focusing on the rise of the computer here, is that “computer” is definitely existing in an ecology in which “film” and “television” are quite prominent, though it seems like our beloved “radio” is on the fritz again. Alright, let’s go into the nineties, another one of my favorite decades. So what I’m noticing here is “computer” is still pretty prominent and it’s definitely associated with writing, but “computer” is not quite as prominent as it was before and that’s kind of interesting.

Ben: Yeah, one read I have on this is that the term “computer” kind of gets subsumed or minimized or naturalized because of the emergence of proxy terms or synonyms. So for instance, at the top we see “technology,” way over there on the southeast corner we have the word “web”—

Jason: Oh, there it is.

Ben: A little before that, “internet.” The computer as this kind of like generic catch-all term starts to become kind of more diffuse. You even see it in words like “world,” I believe. Probably a lot of instances are about the connectivity and the kind of international reach of networks, that they’re starting to capture the imagination of teachers in the day.

Jason: You know, the World Wide Web, man! And you know, I think actually, it’s the rise of the web which is part of the reason that “writing” is still slightly larger than “reading” here, but “reading” is catching up as teachers are increasingly seeing the web as a space for research and information literacy instruction. Okay, we finally made it into our own century. And what a shitshow of a century it has been.

[both laugh]

Okay, but seriously folks, this is really fascinating. Where’s the “computer?” I can’t find it—oh wait, okay. It’s over here, but it’s really declined in prominence and I’m not quite sure what’s going on with that.

Ben: This is the story of how technologies become naturalized and invisible to us. We don’t even think about them anymore. We see the continuation of these other terms, these alternative terms: “web,” right below it “technology” is this kind of generic catch-all. You even see “HTTP” right under “writing.” Because everybody’s writing for the web. One thing I remember about this, why this is showing up in the corpus, is that so many articles that are emerging at the turn of the century are including these tortured, laboriously long and convoluted URLs that make it real pain to type from print into your web browser.

Jason: Oh absolutely. And you know, I also see “online” as another one of these sort of synonyms from the digital, but something that intrigues me under online is “print” emerges, which isn’t actually a term that we’ve seen a lot. I think there’s something about the rise of the digital that makes people have to specify print as a medium when it is being used in ways that we didn’t see before. I’m also just noticing that “writing” and “reading” are relatively equal—“writing” a little bit more prominent but not as dramatic as we saw it in the eighties. So finally, we’re able to step back and look at all hundred years at once. And one of the things that strikes me immediately, many of the media we’ve been talking about so far feature really prominently. So here’s “film,” here’s “television,” here’s “computer,” here’s “radio.” Another thing that really stands out to me is the prominence of the word “new.” That, if you’ve been paying attention across all these clouds, “new” keeps coming up, so this trope that we need to engage with a particular medium because it’s the new exciting thing actually turns out to be very old.

Ben: Yeah, but that’s not entirely the case. Actually, if you look right under “writing,” you see the word “York.” Sometimes those terms were kind of co-located. This has kind of gets at the messiness of doing any kind of dataviz. You have to account for those kinds of conditions so that’s why you dig a little deeper.

Jason: Sure, New York was a major place for media production, but “new” is so much bigger. The one other thing I notice is we’ve been tracking differences between emphasis on writing and reading, but when we step back from the whole hundred years, they’re relatively about the same size maybe a slight edge to “reading,” but, you know, essentially equal.

Ben: To me, what this suggests is that how you adjust scale allows you to tell different stories. Here, this kind of shows a certain balance between “reading” and “writing,” as kind of coequal arms of the whole literacy enterprise, but if you look decade by decade, you’ll notice that there’s kind of a little back-and-forth, it’s kind of tumultuous. Again, maybe a limitation, maybe a strength of this, but I think the important thing to remember is what we’ve done here is kind of demonstrated this tool for you. Elsewhere on this page you’ll actually see these word clouds, and we invite you to play with them yourself and see what you come up with.

Jason: Yeah, you never know what you might find. Like I’m noticing here “people” emerges, which makes me really happy, and I think would make Cindy Selfe really happy, too.

[Video: text on screen reads “Graphs courtesy of Voyant. Jason’s scarf courtesy of Abby Dubisar. Shot on location in Columbus, Ohio. Edited in ScreenFlow and iMovie.”]

Media assets used in this production listed in Production Notes.