A City Collectively

Word clouds are so much fun, I needed an excuse to make another one. So here it is: via facebook, I asked people for one word that says “what this city means to you.” As expected, there were many references to winter weather, but there were some other, less expected words too. Here’s the image I ended up with, a collective perception of our city:

An Assemblage

In one of my other English courses, I’m studying the philosophies of Deleuze. It’s a lot of highly theoretical thinking that’s hard to pin down to earth, but one piece of Deleuzian theory has informed my perception of this city. He discusses literature which makes use of assemblages, an example being the work of Virginia Woolf, which I touched on in a recent post.

As a concept though, the assemblage need not be restricted to the literary world. By Deleuze’s definition, the assemblage is a whole that is not total – it is some group of entities that are brought together by a common affect which they create in their ensemble, and yet those entities remain distinct, and cannot be defined merely by the properties that they share.

That sounds abstract and completely inapplicable to an exploration of Edmonton, but bear with me here. See, as I write, photograph, map, and generally chronicle this city, I’m not finding entities that come together in a nice neat totality that can fit entirely within the name “Edmonton.” My experience of the city is more fragmentary, and yet it is not entirely unlinked. I’m not sure yet what the unifying “affect” is that this city holds for me, but I am beginning to get a sense of an assemblage.

Here is some form of illustration of that – perhaps it’s overly simplistic, but nonetheless, it creates another entity by which to examine this city. It’s a word cloud (thanks wordle), and essentially, it shows the various words from this blog, with font size indicating frequency. Common words like “a” and “the” are removed, but in an approximate way, it shows a literary assemblage of my Edmonton impressions. Make of it what you will, but at the very least, it’s kind of fun.

(click to enlarge)

Defining Home

Edmonton, n.

Pronunciation: /ˈɛdməntən/

1. The capital of the Canadian province of Alberta and the province’s second-largest city.

(adapted from Wikipedia, accessed Feb 8, 2011)

city, n.

Pronunciation:  /ˈsɪtɪ/

 

1. orig. A town or other inhabited place. 

2. spec. A title ranking above that of ‘town’.

e. In the dominion of Canada: a municipality of the highest class.

3. The community of the inhabitants of a city.

(adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed Feb 8, 2011)

community, n.

Pronunciation:  Brit. /kəˈmjuːnɨti/ , U.S. /kəˈmjunədi/

1. A body of people or things viewed collectively.

a. The generality of people; the people as a group.Obs.

b. The body of people having common or equal rights or rank, as distinguished from the privileged classes; the commons; the commonalty.Obs.

2. A body of people who live in the same place, usually sharing a common cultural or ethnic identity. Hence: a place where a particular body of people lives.

 (adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed Feb 8, 2011)

Edmontonian, n.

1. A resident of Edmonton.