(Image by Sheri Edwards, created in Ease.ly)

We’re six months into our CLMOOC Data Postcard Project, and what a treasure it has been to receive such art from such fine people from all over the world. We hope you agree.  And we hope you stay inspired.

This month, we’re thinking of Words. Those things we write with. Think with. Reflect with.

CLMOOC friend Sheri Edwards wrote a blog post (with words) about Words that has inspired us for June’s Data Postcard theme. She ponders that when you have forgotten a word …

“Maybe that’s the time to play with words, take them apart, and remix them into something new. Play with words to keep the meaning of the parts and make better connections. Play with words to make the meaning of your feelings in that moment.” — Sheri Edwards, at 1DR What Else?

For this month’s Data Postcards, inspired by Dear Data, we invite you to think about how to represent the Words of your life. There are all sorts of ways you can go about doing this and the form and shape of your data (what it looks like) is completely up to you.

You might:

• Break down a word into smaller parts and represent it in different ways, as Sheri does
• Count the words of your day (week, etc.)
• Invent new words and share them out
• Tally the words you’ve read in a given period of time
• Tally the words you’ve written in a given period of time
• Compare words written by hand versus words written digitally
• Illustrate your favourite word with a picture or a photo
• Come up with your own ways to play with language

To join us, go here to sign up (and add more topics if you wish!). (Make sure you’ve signed up for our other CLMOOC postcard list first so you have addresses.) The way this all works is somewhat at your discretion — you can mail just one Data Postcard to one person on the list, or make a few for a few people. We don’t expect you to send a postcard to everyone on the list — you can, but that might be a lot of work.

We will be engaging in this from now until the end of June, but with hopes of getting something in the mail by June 15th (more or less — again, no hard and fast boundaries). Feel free to post what you make or what you receive in all the usual spaces. We look forward to hearing from you!