This post is also available in Dutch.
As you may already know from our last two posts, the Donders Wonders blog was founded in 2014 by a group of PhD students at the Donders Institute. Since then, the Donders Wonders has grown to an average of 627 views per day. A large majority of our readers (you!) are located in the Netherlands, followed by the U.S. and Belgium. However, according to our site stats, the Donders Wonders has reached more than 150 countries. That’s amazing and we’re so grateful for all of you!
“On brains and science?”
If you had to describe the Donders Wonders to a friend, how would you describe it? Our slogan is “on brains and science,” but do we stay true to our word? To find out, we made a word cloud of our blog posts.
A word cloud (aka tag cloud) is a visual representation of text content, with the relative size (and sometimes color) of each word in the cloud reflecting its frequency in certain source, such as a website or book: the larger a word is, the more often it occurs. We analyzed the words used most often in Donders Wonders’ first 500 blogs.
We did this by first removing non-informative words (referred to as “stop words”) such as “the,” “different,” and “example” that occur frequently in general1. The resulting list of words (pictured below) is a better representation of the content of our blogs.
A word cloud of the most frequently used words in Donders Wonders’ English blogs. (Only the top 999 words are pictured, due to limited space.)
Word frequencies obtained using the R packages tm, wordcloud and SnowballC. Background image originally by Henry Vandyke Carter via Wikipedia Commons (public domain).
As you can see, true to our slogan, the most frequent (biggest) words have to do with the “brain” (with 1369 occurrences) and science. Within science, our most-blogged about topics are language (359 occurrences), memory (255), stress (239), and pain (221). This is consistent with our most popular topics (which you can find on the menu to the right of this blog): science (127 blog posts) and health (106 blog posts).
Your favorite blog posts
But what do our readers come to Donders Wonders for? To examine this question, we took a look at our most popular blog posts. Because older posts have a higher chance of having more views just because they’ve been published longer, we ranked our blog posts by number of views per days published. The top 10 Donders Wonders blog posts of all-time are:
So now we’d like to ask you: What is your favorite Donders Wonders blog? Have you been wondering about something we haven’t blogged about yet? Leave your wonderings and topic suggestions in a comment and we’ll have a look! Who knows? Maybe our next blog post will be your favorite!
1Stop word exclusion was based on lists from Lewis et al. (2004), the Snowball stemmer project (license), and Gene Diaz (MIT License).
Original language: English
Author: Mónica Wagner
Buddy: Christienne Damatac
Translator: Wessel Hieselaar
Editor translation: Ellen Lommerse
Having been raised with two languages herself, Mónica Wagner is interested in how people use and learn multiple languages, especially when it comes to the sounds of languages. During her licence in psychology (National University of Córdoba, Argentina) she looked into whether people who speak two (or more) languages, when wanting to say the word for ‘dog,’ consider the name in both of their languages. Then, during her Master’s in cognitive neuroscience (Radboud University, The Netherlands), she looked at the other side of the coin: whether bilinguals can selectively listen in one of their languages (sometimes even the wrong one!) and the role of the context they’re in at the moment or whether or not the speaker has a foreign accent. Currently Mónica is working on her PhD at the Donders Centre for Cognition (The Netherlands), where she’s studying individual differences in foreign accent, that is, why some people struggle so much to get rid of their foreign accent in a second language, while others seem to be able to acquire a nativelike accent almost effortlessly. She is new to the Donders Wonders team but will likely blog a lot about her favorite topics: languages, bilinguals, and accents!