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Wordle: a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source.

After spending hours in front of the computer scanning tweets and hashtags over the past few days, I wondered about how our words (and sentiments) might be represented by each individual hashtag. Given the overwhelming response to Top Feminist Hashtags of 2013, (by the way, thank you! Please donate to my labor), I wondered what it means to give meaning to a hashtag. I’m obsessed with data. And whether we like it or not, numbers and words have a unique way of telling their own story.

So what happens when you make a Wordle of the hashtag #TwitterFeminism? By way of Topsy, I took a random sample of 30 tweets (of 598) within the past day that were associated with the #TwitterFeminism hashtag, which roughly amounts to a 5% sample size. I copied and pasted each tweet (manually!) into the a Wordle text box. I removed the hashtag #TwitterFeminism and only placed words without hashtags and Twitter handles in the text box.

#Geekshit

Here’s a screengrab of the search I conducted on Topsy

Here’s a screengrab of the tweets pasted into the Wordle text box

And here’s  the Wordle.

What’s in a #TwitterFeminism hashtag? Speak on it below or tweet us @hashtagfeminism!