As I explain above, I’m spending January creating word clouds from Craigslist personals ads. I’ll be collecting data right away, but it might take me a couple of days to get the word clouds right (and I probably won’t publish every one on every day — there have to be some surprises for the exhibit!). So in the meantime, here’s a sample word cloud drawn from Craigslist “best of” postings, which come from every city in every category, not just personals ads.

Word cloud from Craigslist 'best of' posts

You can almost hear the posts in this word cloud. “Like…just…really!” On the left hand side you can see that there are a lot of wants and needs. Many people seem to have issues with big things. There’s more love (lower left) than fucking (upper center).

Off on the left end of the word cloud you can see a cryptic few letters, src. These will be the subject of a more technical post soon, on why I began this art project with some coding.