Progress: September 10, 2010

I've always wanted the Tongue Rug project to be multilingual. I chose to write the blog in English simply because writing in French always necessitates translation — elaborating my thoughts in my second language can be a laborious process. I am not so precious about writing in my mother tongue. Yet, despite the language choice, by the very nature of my project — where I am researching amongst other subjects the history and literature of French Canada and Quebec — other languages were sure to come into play. Indeed, my writing does include French and Aboriginal words, especially when referring to placenames.

I’ve been thinking about the icons that will adorn each of the tongues. For a long time I envisioned creating traditional sladdakavring icons like flowers and abstract symbols. In the end, I decided to use words; a fitting choice as the tongue swatches were sometimes initialized to represent people or important dates. It came to me while using Antidote HD: one of the filters combs though the text and lists all the recurring words. While this is a way to avoid repetition and to vary one's vocabulary, it can also be used to analyze the text for keywords. On a whim, I searched for an online filter to do the same in English and came across Martin Molch's site — find-keyword.com.

The process was interesting. The blog postings for each tongue were easily transformed into lists of keywords. Some lists being considerably long, I had to go through each one and select about a dozen nouns for each tongue. As all the words were lower case, I encountered a few word slippages. For instance, Robin is both the name of a person and the name of a bird. Also, some of the tongues have saintly overtones because of the simple fact that placenames in Quebec have the “saint” prefix or other religious associations. Once the words were stripped from their context, they were reduced somewhat to the same status: the words that top the list are the ones with the most instances in the text.

Once I set up a list of the Sladdakavring Icons, I worked on a mock-up of the embroidered tongues. A first draft. Not sure if this does it justice? It is striking though how simply reading the list of keywords can trigger memories of place for me, as if the tongue itself has become a memory map.

 

Tension existed between the automated way of capturing keywords and the more deliberate action of choosing words. For TONGUE LA-3 the automatic process culled these words: september (8); saint (8); 2009 (8); lapalme (7); esprit (7); assomption (6); waterway (5); waypoint (5); french (5); route (4); town (4); time (4); québec (4); lanaudière (4). My selection process included these words: achigan, trousser, postillon, sarrasin, galette, jésuites, outaragavisipi. The former is descriptive and quantitative — focusing on the date, the place and the surroundings — while the latter is more evocative and qualitative — minor details, digressions and inner thoughts.