• Personality as Revealed by Tweet Cloud

    Screenshot of a Wordle word cloud of Michelle's most commonly tweeted words
    Credit: Wordle by Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Generic license
    Image: Michelle’s tweet cloud. Most used words: thanks, RT, good, learning and marking.

    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”.

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  • [Feminine Façades & False Faces]

    I was listening to my ’50 Least Played’ list in iTunes a few weeks ago when it rotated to a Disney soundtrack song called Femininity from the 1963 movie Summer Magic. Talk about lyrics from an age with a different set of values:

    Let him do the talking
    Men adore good listeners
    Laugh, but not too loudly (Haha)
    If he should choose to tell a joke
    Be radiant, but delicate
    Memorize the rules of etiquette
    Be demure, sweet and pure
    Hide the real you

    Can you imagine the damage done to an entire generation of young women upon being advised to “hide the real you”? So you would have a private personality that you could maybe share with your close girl friends and a public personality on display to your husband and his male friends or colleagues. I know I would find it very difficult, cultural expectations and conditioning or not, to go through life projecting a fa�ade so much at odds with my inner self-image, although even I admit to tailoring my self-expression somewhat for the audience at hand. Still, spending a large portion of your life suppressing your natural self sounds like the sure road to psychotherapy and confusion, because you feel that your ‘true self’ is not worthwhile or valued.

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