TAG, I’M IT

by Robert Lopresti

A year ago on this very date we began our collective folly here at Criminal Brief. Thanks to all of you who have come along for the ride. As a folkie friend of mine says “If you enjoyed the show half as much as we have, then we enjoyed it twice as much as you.”

It seems incredible that I have found something interesting (well, interest- ing to ME) to talk about for 52 weeks in a row. So I decided to find out what I talked about.

Lost in a cloud 

Are you familiar with Tag Clouds? You have seen them on various websites: a box full of words of different colors and sizes. The color and size indicates how often a given word appears in the text that is being examined. The text is usually the tags applied to a website by its readers.

So, what’s a tag? Essentially they are subject headings created by individual users. Librarians call these “folksonomies” and are fascinated by them. After all, catalogers struggle throughout their careers to create and assign subject headings that everyone can understand, and then tags come along and allow each user to choose their own. For a good example, go to librarything.com. You need to register (for free) and click Search. Type in any book title and look at the box labeled Member Tags.

I selected Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. The tags include the predictable: crime, detective, hardboiled, noir,  etc. But there are also ones that readers are obviously using to track their own collections: ebook, library, paperback, read, unread. 

Found in a crowd

Now, here’s the cool part. The website TagCrowd.com allows you to create a tag cloud for any text you choose. So I put in the text of all fifty-two of my columns in order to find out what I was writing about all this time. TagCrowd automatically eliminates very common words (of, the, or …) but it also allows you to create other lists of stopwords that you use often but don’t want to see in the crowd (I eliminated ago, called, going, happened, etc.) And here are the results:

So it turns out that I have been writing about writing murder mystery short stories.  No surprise there. I also talk a lot about librarian, library, university, job, and work a lot. Music and song make the cut but, to my surprise folk doesn’t. And my one column about the word bun was sufficient to propel that modest baked good into the top fifty.

I wrote about TV  more than death, but not as often as about friends. I said bad more often than good. (Isn’t that typical?) And why does years show up so often? I must be getting nostalgic.

Reducing a novel to fifty words

I was having so much fun with TagCrowd I decided to submit the entire text of my novel Such A Killing Crime  and see what the program could make of that. Here is the resulting cloud:

Not surprisingly, the names of my major characters show up a lot. (But not my hero’s last name, Talley.  Most people just call him Joe.) Notice the rather mild swear words that get repeated a lot (and by the way, I keep track of the favorite cusswords of each character.) Appropriately for a mystery set in the great folk scare of 1963, folk, song,  and music make the top fifty. But, my gosh, why do I use the word door so often? Are my characters coming or going?

I have commented before on the behavioral tics I use to punctuate my characters speech and here they are to haunt me: :frowned, shrugged,  and shook (his head).  And again I seem to obsess about years. I suppose that makes sense in a historical novel.

Another writing tool

One clear result of this: Before I send a story or novel to the publisher I’m going to let TagCrowd take a crack at it and tell me which words I might be overusing.

Meanwhile I am starting a new file for the next year of columns. I hope you will continue on the journey James, Melodie, Deborah, Steven, John, Leigh, and I are undertaking. And if you enjoy it half as much as we do… frowns, shrugs, shakes his head.