Tag clouds are a pretty unique and clever presentation medium. In its original form, it’s used in a way to visually present the tags (topics) applied to a site’s content so the user can see the relative frequency of specific tags and use the actual tags presented in the visual as navigation aids around the website. Lately, however, I’m seeing these used in many other Internet venues. I’ve seen them used at websites to depict the occurrence and frequency of search items and also in the frequency of occurrence of words in a text file. In the example I’ve displayed below, I took the text of the Declaration of Independence and presented the occurrence of the 50 most used words. Even without the actual word count in parentheses beside the words, you can quickly visualize their relative frequency based on their size.
I’ve seen these tag cloud displays in other documents I’ve come across on the Internet and elsewhere, but I never really gave them much thought. They’re seen a lot on blogs and other Internet websites to show the usage of tags at that site. It seems like a very intuitive method of displaying your data to the user. Instead of having to graph the data and create a legend to define your graph’s axes, the data is self-describing in displaying it’s relative importance. Where the visualization becomes problematic is when there is a large variance in the set of data being presented. Font sizes needed to display the smallest and largest values may make the smaller values unreadable or the size of the display untenable. Of course, displaying large variances on a graph have the same problems when trying to depict small values.
I think that as people get more used to this presentation medium, it will be used for more and more types of data. There’s certainly no reason why you couldn’t use it to present financial data, sports information, survey results, etc.
What do you think?
