Being able to convert the horrors of a missing aircraft into a silly, aeroplane-shaped word cloud seems horrific and insensitive, after the fact.

Prior to this activity, I had spent two hours creating a technology-manifesto-word-cloud on Wordle, but Java thwarted me at the final moment, and I lost all my labor in an instant.  After throwing one of my technology-fueled tantrums, I began brainstorming the outlines of my own technology manifesto, while feeling incredibly sorry for myself, before finally realizing things could be way worse– I could be one of the passengers on that Malaysian airplane.

The Tagxedo website lets you enter news search terms to create a word cloud from search results.  So, I entered “Malaysian airplane” because I haven’t been following the news these past few days, and wanted to see if I could get a better idea about something I’d only heard people mention here and there.  I believe the word cloud gave me a pretty good idea of what was going on, even though I haven’t actually read any news articles about the ordeal.

Tagxedo offers many shape, color scheme, font, word dispersal and emphasis options.  I opted for the airplane shape, and the color theme “Lena’s Love Letter”, because it was dark, yet had lots of color variation, and pop!  I deleted various words and word pairings the search pulled up, to maximize word emphasis and overall aesthetics.  I left the fonts Tagxedo chose, even though I didn’t really like them, because they seemed cargo-ish, pre-selected to complement the airplane shape.  The image on the website is interactive.  You can scroll over words to magnify and turn them about, but I didn’t know how to transport all that fancy into our blog, so you guys just get the static jpeg version.

The word “suicide” did not manifest in the Tagxedo word cloud, but I did hear pilot suicide was suspected.