"Visual Thesaurus" Maps Synonyms in a Fresh Way

Visual seems to be the word of the week of here at Paradise Tossed. Yesterday we introduced you to VisualPoetry, and today I want to tell you about a tool that's been around for a while, though you may not have discovered it yet. It's called Visual Thesaurus, and it's a stunning innovation of one of a poet's most important tools.

When poets get stuck on a particular word that doesn't seem to fit right, trusty old Roget's is often the first place they turn. And it does an admirable job, producing for the befuddled wordsmith a quick, neat list of synonyms. It's hard to improve on a reference book that does its job so well: hard, but not impossible.

Thanks to Thinkmap's visualization technology, Visual Thesaurus provides us with the same synonyms that Roget does, but in an intuitive interface that allows our minds to instantly make connections between words.

I think you'll agree that as poets we desperately need access to the often slippery connections between words, and Visual Thesaurus gives us such access. As you can see above, synonyms are arranged in a map with the original word in the center. Each dot branching off from the original word represents a single definition, and each definition has its own set of synonyms.

This simulates the way our minds think about words and the synonyms related to them. We tend to think in terms of interrelated synonyms, not in just static, though complete, lists of similar words. And naturally, each word on the map can be clicked on to produce a new map with that word in the center, allowing cascades of connections that the mind can easily process.

Like all good things, the Visual Thesaurus has its price. But it runs in a desktop edition for a one-time fee and a web edition on a subscription basis, so you can decide how much you want to invest in this product. But any way you slice it [or cut or slash or gash it], Visual Thesaurus can be a great way to add spice to your poetry.

The Wednesday Five

In case you haven’t seen it already, Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy has written a hilarious poem in rhyming couplets called “The ABCs of Skepticism”. Jonathan Swift, eat your heart out!

In this week’s Five, I wanted to focus on poetry tools instead of poetry databases. The sites I’ve listed are excellent resources for helping writers, readers, and teachers to deal with complex poetic issues.

1. Wikisaurus

A little known off-shoot of the vast Wikipedia project, Wikisaurus is one of the best online thesauri out there. I’ve got nothing against Roget’s, but the interactive nature of a wiki fits the idea of a thesaurus perfectly. It’s like asking thousands of your closest friends, “What another word for…?”

2. Wordle

Wordle is a great site for creating “word clouds” out of your own text. This can be great for spicing up an otherwise serious topic. A friend of mine used a cloud from Wordle as a title page for her project on literary freedom in Iran. Also I think that it’s important for poets to never forget that although we deal in words, much of our art is visual in some ways. Plus, this tool is just plain fun to use! Here’s a really great anonymous one about Spring:

3. Poetry Forge
Above is a picture of a a great flash poetry tool for metaphor, but Poetry Forge is chock full of a variety of resources for both students and teachers. Run by the University of Virginia, this site is well-maintained and straightforward: perfect for when you start to feel bogged down by poetic challenges.

4. readwritethink

Not to be confused with last week’s excellent readwritepoem, this site is a fantastic reading and writing guide from the International Reading Association. Geared specifically toward education and making poetry work for teachers and students in and out of the classroom, this site is recommended especially for those of you who instruct poetry in some way.

5. twiHaiku

Alright, so I’ll admit that this site doesn’t fit with today’s theme, but it fit with last Monday’s post, and I can’t go another week without mentioning it. This pretty amazing project is part of the makeliterature.com network, a social website that offers itself up as a self-publishing medium. With your own makeliterature account, you can submit haiku to the twiHaiku site by simply typing it into the right box, just like tweeting yourself. Your haiku is then displayed on the@twiHaiku Twitter account. What this creates is a network of dedicated haiku poets who collaborate to provide the Twitter community with a steady stream of original poetry. If you can’t already tell, I’m simply brimming with excitement about this project, and watching it grow has been great fun!

And that’s it for today. I’d like to finish by asking a question to all the poetry teachers out there: what are your favorite resources for getting your students excited about poetry?