The Visual Thesaurus

I can't keep away from the Visual Thesaurus, produced by an aptly-named company called Thinkmap.

If you type in a word it displays synonyms in an array around the keyword, each item dangling like a flower on a stem. I love the opening few seconds when the word appears and seems to throw out its synonyms, as if generating them one by one.

If you then click on one of the synonyms the array dances into a new position around that word, producing all manner of shapes and clustered patterns.

It's now a cliche to say that web technology like Java gives us a more spatially dynamic and fluid experience of text. I can imagine essays written like this visual thesaurus. Each stem could be a paragraph or a citation. The reader selects a path and builds a text from a map and not from a writer's linear 'argument' or 'narrative'. Genres explode. Writing is scattered.

Using this thesaurus offers possibilities for exploring language that the old linear Roget's did not. But I can also imagine it being useless for writers looking for a good word for a worn-out one. It carries you away into the forest of words. This new technology is not based on the notion of a list, a catalogue, an archive, as much as a theatre, a spectacle of language.

But something else intrigues me about the Visual Thesaurus. It is the movement of words. I like the idea of text materially moving and re-assembling itself in new relations. I think we do this when we read - we transpose, transplant, dislocate, interconnect, abbreviate and expand the textual elements we are reading, always transforming what we try to understand. We follow writers, but subvert them too.

But here there is a glimpse of something else, of alert and dynamic movement - of agency? - in words themselves.

Except I am taken in by the technology, of course. Somebody has decreed those dancing stems and arranged those word-bouquets. Language moves here; but it is still turned into an institution, a system, and a commodity. There is still the idea of a centre and a periphery, of equals and opposites, of an orderly world of signifiers.

Except there is a moment of anarchy and unexpectedness, when the technology is at work and words are on the move, which you can't get from the linear printed page.

Visual Thesaurus.