Niall Sclater posted an article on his blog yesterday about personality and tweet clouds.  Inspired, I ran used Wordle of my top used words. TweeetStats, like many text analysis tools, uses a stop list, removing common words like “and”, “the”, “a”, etc. TweetStats gave me the option of additionally removing the names of people to whom I was replying, so terms like “@psychemedia” and “@AJCann” have also been excluded. It could use some better stemming. “Courses” and “course” appear as separate entries, as do “game” and “games”.

Credit: Screenshot by Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Generic license
Image: Graph of Michelle’s Twitter client usage. Most common is Twitter for iPhone at over 1500 tweets, followed by Syrinx (for the Mac) at 1000 and then Tweetie for the Mac.

Looking at the generated stats, I apparently reply a lot.  54% of my tweets, according to TweetStats, have been replies.  I’m not sure the data is complete though.  There’s a big gap in the chart (see image below), making it look like I didn’t have any tweets between January 2009 and January 2010.  That’s definitely wrong! Missing an entire year’s worth of tweets likely influences my tweet cloud considerably. I suspect the missing bits are due to restrictions that Twitter has on the amount of requests for information that can be sent. I am not convinced it even reflects all of this year’s tweets. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could comment on that.

Although I tried Twitter for the iPhone for a day or two, I never really used it that much. I believe that Tweetie, which I did use, got rebranded as Twitter for iPhone, so my past usage of that client. The interface usage statistics also include “Syrinx”, which I don’t remember using beyond opening it up. I certainly used Tweetie for Mac far more than I’ve used Syrinx. I suppose it’s possible that’s another renamed Twitter client. Prior to using Tweetie for the Mac, I used Twhirl. That doesn’t show at all and I used that for a long time. Another victim of the missing time? Possibly.

Credit: Screenshot by Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Generic license
Image: Michelle’s timeline of tweets since 2008.

Examining the word cloud at the top of this post, I obviously spend too much time marking or talking about marking.  To be fair, some could be assessment principles or assessment research.  After all, learning, students, and research are quite high too. That said, other than I’m Canadian with a penchant for “good” “think”ing, what does this say about my personality? Does it really reflect my obsessions? I do think a lot, but I also read a lot and play games. They feature in there, but not as much as I would expect. I maintain multiple Twitter accounts, so perhaps my interests have been split somewhat and this main account distributes my interests more evenly, making it harder to represent me on the basis of my tweets.

I see I am stereotypically Canadian; “thanks” figures quite prominently. I also share and acknowledge the words of others, because “rt”, short for retweet, frequently occurs. Something is interesting from what doesn’t appear: negative terms. “good” and “interesting” are there, but words of complaint or dislike or other negative emotions do not feature often enough to show up on the word cloud. That suggests I am a positive person. I would disagree with that. I think I can be highly critical and frequently negative, but I tend to keep it to myself rather than impulsively blurting it out on Twitter.

Are you what you tweet? What does a tweet cloud reveal about your personality and interests?

Once upon a time, in a cold, beautiful land, there lived a quirky blonde sysop named Michelle. Michelle had a long history of using electronic bulletin boards in the early 1980s, long before the days of Internet popularity. Among her many first pseudonyms or nicknames were things like The Admiral, Irish Coffee, or Desiderata, although most of those were for specific clandestine purposes. She often just used her own first name and a fine name it was. However, she had quickly discovered that using her own rather feminine name was prone to bring unwanted attentions upon her. She flitted electronically amongst a mostly (hormone-laden) geeky male world like a ghostly angel of the aether.

When the day came to join the ranks of the Internet Relay Chatters (IRC) in 1992, she didn’t feel comfortable in using a feminine name. She wanted something vaguely male sounding or non-gender specific. At the time, she was travelling quite often between her beautiful, cold land and Switzerland. The areas of Switzerland she was in were German-speaking, and the word “Eingang” appeared all over the place: on the entrance to the highways, above doors into malls or buildings, everywhere!

This word appealed to her. It appealed to her a lot. So “Eingang”–entrance–she became. German speakers know “Eingang” is a masculine word, and English speakers generally don’t know, so she didn’t ever suffer from those unwanted attentions. Later, she decided, in retrospect, that her nickname should really fully be “Eingang des Chaos”–the entrance to chaos–which, for those of you who know her well, is very appropriate.

Now, many many years later, far away from her beautiful, cold land, she’s still the Eingang or the Ein, and there are many EinThings. You might say that she has her own Eindentity!