Week 4: From Bedraggled Daisies to Semantic Swarms

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Echoing my fellow bloggers, I found this week’s blog post challenging. I’m a bit of a (fine, a lot of a) perfectionist and found it difficult to let my hand and mind work together in a relaxed and fluid manner to create a daisy/venn-type diagram. Maybe I need to take the time to draw more or at least write using an analog device to let this process happen? To let my brain do more productive creative thinking when mind and hand are working in unison? Initially, I sort of stalled when thinking about my first petal. It made more sense for me to do a first draft brainstorm (I know, perfectionism in action…), which resulted in a bunch of interconnected word swarms (see Fig. 1). What happened is that I would think of a root keyword that relates to my research question and then I thought of potential linking keywords that have their own flow and directionality in relation to the initial subject/concept. What I came up with was conceptual swarms of related keywords. I then attempted to translate some of the content from those word swarms to a daisy configuration (see Fig. 2). While the overlapping petals were helpful in modelling layers of subject intersectionality, it did not help me to clarify the more complex directionality of syntax: how these semantic keywords relate to one another and how to discern the scale of those often "many-to-many" semantic relationships. It’s almost as if there’s the meta-level venn-diagram type conceptual daisy and that each of those petals could be modelled as semantic swarms. Ultimately, those semantic bits could be put into some kind of flow chart arrangement that shows directionality and linkages between keywords and cross-references the other petals, as necessary. I would ultimately be trying to abstract these semantic swarms into "one-to-many" relationship with each attempt to model at a different scale of interaction... but maybe it's the actual research process that would help me to get there... After modelling the keyword flows within the semantic swarms, I would then organize those permutations into Universal Decimal Classification-type hierarchical and syntactic strings. However, I was not sure how to draw all of this!