Of word clouds and speaker bios

Next week, I head to Virgina Tech to give a talk as part of the Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (GBCB) guest lecture series. I think Chris Lasher needs a stern talking to about his speaker choices, but it gets me to talk science so can’t really complain.

The topic of my talk is Science Big. Science Connected. I am still working through the slides, but the talk is an extension of many of the things I talk about here at bbgm. In my head that is best represented as Big data and the networked future of science

But that’s not what I wanted to really talk about. The best part about the whole thing is the flyer that Chris and Co came up with.

They used my delicious feed to build a tag cloud using Wordle. The results are wonderful and give you a better insight into things that I get interested about that I could have told you in 5 minutes myself. Perhaps Bill Hooker and Michael Nielsen put it best on the Friendfeed thread

That’s a great way to present a “snapshot” of visiting speakers. You could use their papers, website, FF, anything — and potential audience can see at a glance what the person is “about”. Brilliant.

In many ways, it’s better than the “About the Speaker” bios. Those often contain interesting tidbits, but they often contain loads of really boring stuff, too

Brilliant indeed. I think we should do this for all speaker bios. Visual art is much more interesting that the usual stuff.