Monday
is upon us, time to live up to my promise!
True
confessions of a Molly Mormon Democrat: I have trouble retaining General
Conference. It’s not that I don’t enjoy watching
it, but I have trouble remembering any of it afterwards. Once the talks are posted online, I do much
better reading them.
When
I was little, I remember drawing each speaker (I think this was my mom’s way of
forcing me at least to pay a little bit of attention). Unfortunately, I have zero artistic talent,
so I’m pretty sure most of my drawings looked exactly the same. Perhaps the only thing different was glasses
or the amount of hair on the speaker.
In
case you missed the Church’s general conference last week, I decided to create
a visual representation of the talks in the form of a word cloud. Word clouds are an image of text – bigger words
mean that these words appear more often in the text. Sometimes word clouds help you to see themes
in a speech, book, or article.
I
cut and pasted all of the General Conference talks into one big document and
fed that into the “wordle” website. So,
below is my word cloud – what sticks out to you?
I
like the little “desire good” at the bottom right-hand corner. It’s complete coincidence that the words
ended up next to each other, but it’s usually the basic message of conference:
desire good! I also like that “Love” is
at the center – it should be central to who we are, because I think it’s a
powerful principle. What themes did you
sense in General Conference?
If, for some reason, the wordle shows up very small, the link is here to view it full size.
Like you, I don't really remember the talks. I listened to almost all of them but I didn't retain themes very well. I am going to start studying them online so I can remember what I listened to.
ReplyDeleteThis conference was the first time I've successfully retained some of the overall themes and I'm so proud of myself (I watched 3/4 sessions). I really felt like Love was an enormously central theme this time around and I loved that about this particular conference.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I just went through and read a few of your earlier posts. I loved your Valentine's day thoughts - so many times when I start wishing there was a man in my life one of my friends steps in to fill the void. It's pretty awesome how that works out, isn't it?
I usually always have a hard time remembering what was said at conference. I can tell you that the first two talks Saturday morning were about having babies.
ReplyDeleteThanks all for commenting, and reading...I need to go re-read conference now that I've blogged about how I don't retain it :)
ReplyDelete