“Toward the end of the Sakuntala, the most famous of the three surviving plays by Kalidasa–the poet usually considered the finest in ancient India–the hero Dushyanta offers this poignant self-analysis:
Like someone staring at an elephant
who says, “There is no elephant here,”
and who then, as it moves away,
feels a certain doubt
and later, seeing its footprints,
is certain: “An elephant has been here”–
such are the subtle
workings of my mind.
Or of any mind–the rueful king speaks for all of us. We almost always miss the elephant in front of us. By the time we make our retrospective deduction from the footprints, it’s usually too late.”
Wordle creates word clouds from text. You can paste in a block of text or provide a url that will generate a word cloud from the feed. Above is the word cloud from mymindonbooks.com (click the image for a more readable view); since it comes from the feed it has just the last few posts. So “snapshots” could be taken of a blog or website over time.
It’s a little off topic, but I really enjoyed this video by Dr. Michael Wesch, which was recently presented at the Library of Congress (and a book does make a cameo appearance):
One wonderful moment is when a student holds a mirror up to her webcam, saying “this is what I’m talking to.”
See also Wesch’s Digital Ethnography blog for further discussion of concepts such as “aesthetic arrest” and “context collapse.”
In this way Shakespeare is stretching us, making us more alive, at a level of neural excitement never fully exorcised by later conceptualisation; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments. Our findings begin to show how Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence – at the neural level – of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension. It is as though he is a pianist using one hand to keep the background melody going, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations.
