For my word cloud I used the text from Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, and placed it in the shape of a computer. Little brother tells the story of a high schooler and this peers living in a society plagued with hyper surveillance and paranoia, and how these teenagers choose to fight back against the oppression of their government. The book centers around technology, and how it can be both a blessing and a curse, so I thought it would be fitting to put the text in the shape of a computer. I didn’t fiddle with the word weight very much because I liked the the vibe of the image as it is, as a result a lot of the words that stand out are just transitional like ‘like’, ‘and’, ‘can’, etc. However, there are a couple of others that really stand out like ‘Know’ and ‘Knew’, which is interesting because of the emphasis that is put on knowledge in this story, and how the characters’ understanding of the world changes so rapidly and so frequently as the story progresses, they thought they ‘knew’ how the world worked, but by the end of the book their perception had changed completely. There is also an emphasis on controlling how people think in the story, and what people see, and, funny enough, ‘look’ and ‘think’ also pop up quite a bit in the world cloud. I just thought it was interesting that even though I barely adjusted the weight of the words, the image captures the major themes of the book pretty well.
Text Analysis: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
