Tag cloud
From Business Intelligence
 AAUP's "The Value of Diversity", generated using TagCrowd. This tag cloud uses saturation values as well as size values to convey the information, which makes it easier to sort out the different data elements and determine whether, for example, 'students' or 'problems' is more frequent. |
 UM Awarded Project Titles 2006. This tag cloud uses alternating colors to help the eye distinguish between elements. Due to its striking resemblance to the type of tag cloud in the third example, this method should be avoided. |
 State of the Union 2003 vs 2008. Tag clouds can also compare two texts against one another. |
Description
This visualization is a listing of words that uses size to depict the frequency of a particular word within the text. This is a text analysis tool. Good for conveying many different items, whereas traditional bar and pie charts have a legibility limit of about a dozen items. This method is especially efficient for analyzing textual data for frequent themes, and displays results with good data density. Tag clouds can also be used to compare two different texts using different colors, for instance, State of the Union addresses from two different years.
Data requirements
Texts selected for this analysis must be sufficiently lengthy to show meaningful data, but there is an upper processing speed limit to the text analysis.
Considerations
- Longer words are emphasized over shorter words.
- Words with many ascenders and descenders (letters with heights above and below the baseline, like p and b) may be visually emphasized
- Context is not available unless the tag cloud is interactive.
Links
- Learn more about the tag cloud at ManyEyes.