Word Network
Allistar, Eugene, Yan Yan and I were in a group together for this project. At first we had many different ideas, but nothing really seemed like it could lead to a project. At some point, we decided to brainstorm with different ideas and found that we were interested in the relation between the words we were blurting out, and whether or not if we kept coming up with ideas, we would have a set of very similar words.
That was the beginning of our idea. We wanted to see how words relate to each other, and how associations between words can lead different people to come up with increasingly more related words. We were trying to figure out how to visualize this, using the board as a rough prototyping tool. Somehow we decided that people might influence each other too much, if we just ask the whole class to shout out related words, and that we wouldn't be building a particularly interesting network. We then thought about considering each person's associations separately, and then comparing people's networks to each other. We all agreed that this would be very interesting to look at, and then decided to find a way to visualize it. Initially we thought about giving people transparencies with words printed on them, and ask them to draw lines between words that they associate with each other and then overlay them and look for patterns, but thought that the way we arrange them spatially on the sheet might inadvertently influence them. So we ended up giving people independent words (each of us picked 2 words, so we had a total of 8 more or less randomly chosen words), and asking them to connect them to each other with elastic bands if they found a connection between them. We then stacked the same words on the same pole of the wooden device that we built and let the yellow elastic bands illustrate the connections.
The result was quite interesting. I was a little worried at first that the results would be very uniform, and that the experiment would be a bit of a failure, but I was happily surprised by the outcome. The structure was definitely interesting to look at, and the variation in the connections was pretty satisfying. I noticed that someone interpreted one of the words differently from how we had intended it ("wind", as a verb, as opposed to the noun), which was a perfectly valid thing to do, just one I hadn't anticipated at all. That's just one of the many complexities of language and playing with words and meanings that to me makes it an interesting subject matter to explore.
