[ Lost in the Landscape ]

chicago winter fling

It’s win­ter here in Chicago alright. There wasn’t much snow on the ground when I arrived, but a quick look at the leaf­less trees and a quick duck out­side didn’t leave any con­fu­sion that it’s any sea­son other than win­ter. I’ve been pretty busy attend­ing a con­fer­ence, but I did man­age to take a lit­tle archi­tec­tural tour the other day with some of the other conferees.

Here’s a nice house in the Hyde Park neigh­bor­hood as seen from the bus. Notice the wintry-looking bare trees. Brrrr, cold, said the Cal­i­for­nia blogger.

Though nice, the house isn’t a major archi­tec­tural land­mark. How­ever, as of last month, it became an impor­tant his­tor­i­cal one: This is the non-White House res­i­dence of Barack Obama. Actu­ally, it’s the side of the house. The road on the front side has been sealed off by the Secret Ser­vice.

That in part sums up the expe­ri­ence of vis­it­ing here in the win­ter. There’s a lot of stuff that would be really interesting–if only it were open. Or you see stuff that’s maybe not look­ing its best.

Still, there are at least a cou­ple blog­gable things I’ve run across that I’ll be post­ing after I return home. If only this were May, when the gar­dens are look­ing more extrav­a­gant and the gar­den blog­gers will be con­ven­ing for their Spring Fling…

February 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Barack Obama • Chicago • Hyde Park • seasons • winter | 4 Comments »

visualize your blog content

A lot of blogs these days–including this one–have tag clouds in their side­bars. These highly visual dis­plays of tags the blog­ger has sup­plied give you a good sense of the kinds of top­ics the blog cov­ers. And they give you a sense of how often the top­ics get discussed.

These do a nice job of dis­play­ing the words the blog­ger thought would be impor­tant, but they some­times miss the big pic­ture that you could get by turn­ing an entire post into a cloud, some­thing using all the words in the post, not just the ones sup­plied by the blogger.

One of the inter­est­ing things I saw in the cov­er­age of Barack Obama’s inau­gu­ra­tion was an Asso­ci­ated Press visu­al­iza­tion of his inau­gural address using an online tool to ana­lyze the fre­quency of the words he used. (Per­haps the AP’s analy­sis was based on one at Free Gov­ern­ment Infor­ma­tion.) Then the story went on to com­pare it with a visu­al­ized ver­sion of George Bush’s 2005 inau­gural address.

I used the same tool, TagCrowd, to re-visualize the same Obama speech. TagCrowd picks the most fre­quently used words and assigns dif­fer­ent sizes to them. As in a reg­u­lar tag cloud, the big­ger the visu­al­ized word, the more times it was used.

But instead of com­par­ing it to Bush’s address, I visu­al­ized Lincoln’s Get­tys­burg address, since peo­ple seem to com­pare Obama and Lin­coln. You can see how lan­guage has shifted over one and a half cen­turies, as well as how dif­fer­ently the men use words.

Inter­est­ing, huh?

Then I thought, why not try visu­al­iz­ing some blog posts by turn­ing all the words in blog posts into clouds? Would the results between posts be that dif­fer­ent? And would they dif­fer much from the tag cloud in my left sidebar?

The first post­ing I ana­lyzed is a recent one, “greener gar­den­ing prac­tices,” from Jan­u­ary 7:

How would that gar­den­ing post com­pare with one of my older hoity-toity art posts? This is the cloud derived from “gar­dens, phone­booths, poet­ics and old maids,” a post from Jan­u­ary 21, 2008:

Pretty dif­fer­ent clouds, I thought. (And sorry for the typos on “Cochise!”) The dif­fer­ent sub­jects resulted in dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lar­ies and dif­fer­ent word emphases. Also, over the last year, I’ve been try­ing to sim­plify my writ­ing for the web–not at all dumb­ing it down, but adapt­ing to how peo­ple read text on a screen ver­sus text in a book. That prob­a­bly con­tributed to a dif­fer­ence between the two posts.

Try TagCrowd. Com­pare old posts with new posts, or posts about your gar­den with those about your friends or trav­els. Or pick just one text you like to see what the repeated words tell you.

I think you’ll dis­cover some inter­est­ing things!

January 23 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Abraham Lincoln • Barack Obama • blog posts • blogging • speeches • tag clouds • TagCrowd • tagging • tags | 6 Comments »

talking trees

If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tues­day morn­ing I had my choice of places to view the tele­vised inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Work­ing as I do on the UCSD cam­pus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at cof­fee stands and indi­vid­ual lap­tops that were all play­ing the cer­e­monies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inau­gu­ra­tion broad­cast through the speak­ers of lead-plated euca­lyp­tus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stu­art Col­lec­tion.

Left: The tree in the instal­la­tion that plays music.

The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was con­structed from three euca­lyp­tus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new con­struc­tion. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preser­v­a­tive, reassem­bled, and then cov­ered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stu­art Collection’s descrip­tion offers this explanation:

One could walk through the grove sev­eral times before notic­ing Allen’s two unob­tru­sive trees.  Not only do these trees rein­vest a nat­ural site with a lit­eral sense of magic but they implic­itly make con­nec­tions between nature and death and the life of the spirit.  It is not sur­pris­ing that stu­dents have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”

At the entrance to the vast, geo­met­ric library the third tree of Allen’s instal­la­tion remains silent — per­haps another form of the tree of knowl­edge, per­haps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build build­ings, per­haps a dance form, or per­haps not­ing that one can acquire knowl­edge both through obser­va­tion of nature and through research.

Right: The tree in the instal­la­tion that recites poetry.

On Tues­day, the tree that ordi­nar­ily recites poetry and the one that typ­i­cally offers songs and music were ded­i­cated to an audio feed of the Pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion. The orga­niz­ers had high hopes, pre­dict­ing “hun­dreds of stu­dents” would show up for the event. But for the few min­utes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen peo­ple and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attend­ing with their own­ers, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).

Left: The “bark” on the mute tree, show­ing the nails hold­ing the lead plates, as well as the list of cred­its of the peo­ple who worked on the project.

Left: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.

The spe­cial pro­gram­ming wasn’t the eas­i­est sell that morn­ing. The inau­gu­ra­tion was already a huge event.

I’ll have to admit I had a hard time pay­ing atten­tion the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talk­ing trees in a for­est weren’t enough to get peo­ple to stop.

January 22 2009 | Categories: art | Tags: Barack Obama • eucalyptus • presidential inauguration • recycling • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »

poultry: 1, humans: 0

What fol­lows is an unpaid polit­i­cal rant.

Unless you’re read­ing this blog using a bicycle-powered gen­er­a­tor in the desert out­back some­where east of Perth you’ve heard of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change in the lead­er­ship of the United States. It’s the cul­mi­na­tion of tire­less work for equal­ity and civil rights by gen­er­a­tions of good peo­ple. In Tuesday’s Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions, in addi­tion to vot­ing for Barack Obama in a land­slide, vot­ers also over­whelm­ingly approved Propo­si­tion 2, a wor­thy ini­tia­tive that man­dates more humane cage con­di­tions for chick­ens and other farm animals.

I should be happy, and I am gen­uinely happy–about those and many other things that hap­pened elec­tion day.

This gar­dener is pissed

But pol­i­tics is a messy beast, and this gar­dener is hav­ing a bout of bad atti­tude. It started on Mon­day with the first signs of a bad cold and then wors­ened as some of the polit­i­cal fall­out from Tuesday’s elec­tions became clearer. So often, along with the good and rev­o­lu­tion­ary, you get deliv­ered the vile and reac­tionary. In the same Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions I referred to the pop­u­lace nar­rowly approved Propo­si­tion 8, a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment rescind­ing the rights of gay and les­bian cit­i­zens from mar­ry­ing each other, thereby uphold­ing the tra­di­tional val­ues of hav­ing gays and les­bians marry peo­ple of the oppo­site gender.

In effect, in their actions, the vot­ers of Cal­i­for­nia decided to grant addi­tional civil rights to poul­try, while at the same time rescind­ing rights for the state’s gay and les­bian population.

So, are we to con­clude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise prop­erty taxes, all it takes is a slim major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion to take rights away from thou­sands of its fel­low cit­i­zens? Have the Cal­i­for­nia vot­ers said that my com­mit­ment in mar­riage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!

The law­suits have begun, and one of the argu­ments is that very issue of the size of the vote nec­es­sary to revise a basic right that’s in the con­sti­tu­tion ver­sus merely amend­ing it. Legal chal­lenges often get a bad rap in this coun­try, but if it had been left exclu­sively to the pop­u­lar vote we’d still have things like seg­re­ga­tion and indus­trial runoff ignit­ing the rivers of the Northeast.

My cur­rent cold will pass, along with my cur­rent bad atti­tude. No mat­ter the imme­di­ate out­comes of the chal­lenges to Propo­si­tion 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intol­er­ance. No mat­ter what tran­spires, John and I will con­tinue to con­sider our­selves married.

It’ll take a while for the cul­ture to change, but the signs are every­where. Although peo­ple over 30 voted for California’s Propo­si­tion 8, the pop­u­la­tion 30 and under soundly rejected it by a mar­gin of two to one.

Another sign: Let me quote the final sen­tence of Mar­tin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.

…And when this hap­pens, when we allow free­dom to ring, when we let it ring from every vil­lage and every ham­let, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s chil­dren, black men and white men, Jews and Gen­tiles, Protes­tants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spir­i­tual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

And let me com­pare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tues­day night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his Amer­ica resides in the third para­graph from the very beginning.

If there is any­one out there who still doubts that Amer­ica is a place where all things are pos­si­ble, who still won­ders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still ques­tions the power of our democ­racy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in num­bers this nation has never seen, by peo­ple who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be dif­fer­ent, that their voices could be that difference.

It’s the answer spo­ken by young and old, rich and poor, Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­can, black, white, His­panic, Asian, Native Amer­i­can, gay, straight, dis­abled and not dis­abled. Amer­i­cans who sent a mes­sage to the world that we have never been just a col­lec­tion of indi­vid­u­als or a col­lec­tion of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

At no time in his cam­paign did Obama defend gay mar­riage. That would have been polit­i­cal sui­cide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invis­i­ble as we were in King’s day. This is a dif­fer­ent vision of Amer­ica that will come to be as the next gen­er­a­tion finally gets its say.

The bar has been raised.

November 06 2008 | Categories: everything • quotes • rambles | Tags: Barack Obama • gay marriage • gay weddings • Martin Luther King • politics • Proposition 2 • Proposition 8 | 2 Comments »