Hope this sounds coherent. Did some research… The visual thesaurus taps into google analytics, which is a massive massive database of how links happen in the web. google analytics, through some means… I guess through analyzing keywords?… in turn taps into all the online dictionaries and thesauri already out there and pulls in their data. Visual thesaurus thus acts like a search engine and does not have its own database… just a javascript application (and a fairly simple one at that) that creates the graphic from someone else’s data. Pretty clever. The graphic is modeled on the concept of a mind map diagram. this is a common tool used for brainstorming by a lot of folks. The script makes the graphic look very dynamic by kind of “bouncing” the data around as it populates the screen. Yet it is the opposite of mind mapping: those who use mind maps as a brainstorming tool encourage “irrational” or “nonsensical” associations by asking the themselves not to judge the connections made, that is, there is no rigorous “right” or “wrong” in the mind mapping… it’s like recording a stream of consciousness. By contrast, visual thesaurus is a very rational expression of known associations. Thus we can talk about this idea of an “irrational” thesaurus, the thesaurus of equivocation: puns, semantic shifts, metaphor, fallacy… this approaches the political syllogism in an interesting way. ” We must do something…This is something… Therefore, we must do this.”
I don’t know what all this has to do with climacteric, but hey, it’s out there…
