V  I S U A L   R E F L E C T I O N

The visualization assignment was an interesting way to reflect on the semester – recalling previous interests, seeing how interests changed, and identifying what themes remained important as I spent time exploring science fiction on my own. I was unable to upload all of my links at once, so I split the list into two and created two visualizations. I think it is a bit hilarious that steampunk is so prominent – I chose to look into this topic because I had no idea what it was and ended up collecting a lot of links as a did my research. Frankenstein was a pretty important term for me. I read Frankenstein because of my interest in Romantic era literature, and conveniently, this story worked well with this course as it is one of the early SF novels. I think it is telling that I spent much of my time researching and thinking about Frankenstein. I am not naturally drawn to science fiction, but I think this story really solidified the genre, its consequences, and points of interest for me: the concerns of this story – ethics, humanity, religion, love, morality, human interaction, personal and social identity – are captured in the word clouds (human, science, life, social, time, people, culture, monster). I think the prominence of this story and the related themes are suggestive of my point of entry into science fiction: it is not the technology or the fantastical that I am attracted to, it is the human, the implications of human behavior in the realm of science and exploration, what SF can tell us about ourselves, how people exist and interact in complicated SF worlds, and how we experience abstraction and the inexplicable in our own world.

Cloud One: https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=87d033981b2da7b1e5959cdf8aed8071&visible=175&view=Cirrus

Cloud Two: https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=bdca009dc1a20ea4e0810e9de764f37a&visible=25&view=Cirrus