Summary Methodology:

Hi all, I will take a few minutes during our 1/12/26 Search Committee Meeting to summarize my Word Cloud Assembly methodology. Until then, I can briefly summarize the steps:

1. Original 10/19/25 Parish Wide Meeting led by Rev. Marion Sprott (4 questions responded to by attendees) and the Search Committee led 11/16/25 Parish Conversation on the 5 Questions presented:

   1. For the 10/19/25 meeting, Ellen McCrae scribed the notes and converted them into a spreadsheet table for processing;

   2. The the 11/16/25 meeting, I photographed the 5 pages covered with the post-it notes (228 notes in all, or roughly 57 per question;

   3. Then, I photographed and/or voice dictated the responses into a tabulation (you can view these under the “Q1, Q2…” tabs. These were dictated as close to verbatim as possible. I only took an editorial liberty when the voice dictation or OCR character recognition would not translate the handwriting or other human “pen on small paper” effects.

2. I used a program called “Word Art” (www.wordart.com) that formats tabulated text into the word cloud format:

   1. First, I copied and pasted the tabulated text into the program’s input table;

   2. Second, I formatted the shape, color, font, size, etc. of the word cloud output;

   3. Third, I prompted Google Docs (supplemented and powered by its Google Gemini features) to provide word counts, synonym analysis, phrasing relationships, sentence structure (for questions that asked for sentence responses), tonal relationships/frequencies, theme aggregation/frequencies, and aggregated meaning from the full sample of tabulated responses;

   4. Fourth, I prompted Google Docs to provide the ranked top ten aggregated responses/themes that the information provided and added these ten responses to the Word Art tabulation and placed these ten as the first ten postings in the tabulation, and assigned word/phrase size weightings as follows:

      1. 1-5: size 4 weight

      2. 6-10: size 3 weight

      3. All individual responses: size 1 weight

3. I ran the Word Art program to complete each Word Cloud. The software simply reviews the inputs by their rank and discretely adjusts the sizing of the words and phrases by their ranking. The top ten rankings are aggregated topics; everything else is raw data. If the raw data was re-ranked in a different order, these individual responses would be varying sizes based upon that ranking. The top ten would remain the same with each iteration of individual responses.

4. The word clouds themselves are interactive–one can drag their mouse cursors over every word/phrase for magnification.

As always, don’t hesitate to call or write to me should you have any questions.

Take care,

Jeff

336-212-6238-cell

228

~57

per question

Post-it Notes