Maria Brumm has a Master's degree... in Earth Science! She lives in Seattle, WA, where she works in environmental consulting.
Brian posted tag clouds for two of his recent papers. Having no shame, Lab Lemming followed suit. Since I have even less shame, I'm just going to jump on while the bandwagon is rolling.
So here's the tag cloud for Davies et al., 2008, currently in review with EPSL:
That's not too bad. It passes the suckup test at least - none of the authors, or the authors' PhD advisors, were referenced often enough to appear in the list. However, it fails the squabbling faction test - our archrival colleague Adriano Mazzini, who's done lots of work on the same system and come to different conclusions, makes the tag list. I'd have to go back and count to see how many of the references are places where we build on his work and the work of his collaborators, and how many are places where we disagree with their conclusions. We were careful not to issue any mentitas. Note also the inconsistent use of "Fig." and "Figure" - oops.
Now let's try Brumm et al. 2008, currently in review with the Journal of Marine and Petroleum Geology:
Brutally fails the suckup test, the self-citation test, the squabble test, and the heavily cites a recent review instead of the original papers test! It's a good thing I have less than no shame. (Note to reviewers: These citations are all perfectly appropriate.)
Okay, last but not least: Brumm et al. in prep, which I will submit just as soon as I have stopped being distracted by the various things on my to-do list that actually have hard deadlines attached:
The number of tags my final paper shares with the first two might explain why I haven't finished writing up my thesis yet. I'm stuck on the part where I have to describe how "et al.", "significant", and "km" constitute the unifying themes of a single, coherent intellectual endeavor.
Comments
Can you drop any hints as to why 'sierra' and 'nevada' are dissimilar in size?
Posted by: Lab Lemming | May 5, 2008 1:30 AM
Sloppy writing, probably.
Posted by: Maria | May 5, 2008 1:39 AM
So I can stop trying to find "Leone" then?
Posted by: Lab Lemming | May 5, 2008 6:24 AM
What's the purpose of the "tag cloud"?
Posted by: PhysioProf | May 5, 2008 7:12 AM
PhysioProf ... if you mean what's the purpose of doing it for scientific papers like we've done, then I guess, for me, it's to simply get a very quick visualization of what a paper is about. Simple as that.
I think what's kinda cool is when you compare the text clouds from the different authors ... you can really see what specific research they are interested in (or, at least, what they are working on).
So, I guess it depends on what you mean by "purpose". We are simply communicating what we write about to each other. The text cloud allows someone to digest the main topic/discipline/theme with a 10-second glance.
Posted by: BrianR | May 5, 2008 10:59 AM
LL: Yes. Also "Madre".
PP: Purpose?! It's a tag cloud! How dare you question Web 2.0!
Posted by: Maria | May 5, 2008 3:21 PM
Maria - I'm passing this Six Word Meme thing on to you (I got it from Dinochick); details at LFD (that's Looking For Detachment not some f sort of thing!).
Posted by: Silver Fox | May 6, 2008 11:25 AM