Both Sides Now

When is a tag not a tag ?

When it is part of a text cloud rather than a tag cloud.

The term text cloud, which I borrow from Joe Lamantia's article "Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?", is a very useful one, because is shows us that the ONLY thing a text cloud and tag cloud have in common is the style of the visualization, the representation. The underlying represented is quite different.

Both of the following are mistakenly called by the same term, tag cloud, but the first is a text cloud, and the second is a tag cloud.

Image:	Source:
	State of the Union
	PennTags

A text cloud will show me the unchanging visual lexical distribution based on author data; basically it's just a visual form of a good old fashioned word frequency index. It is controlled by one person: the author. It does not vary.

A tag cloud will show me the changeable conceptual visual distribution of the audience metadata, that is, how many many individuals have categorized and conceptualized the text. It can and should vary both over the concepts of the individual contributors, and also should vary through time as the concepts of the audience change as the audience changes.

Text Cloud	Tag Cloud
Data	Metadata
Text	Comment
Author	Audience
Lexical	Conceptual
Fixed	Fluid
Invariant	Stable Core & Individual Variants

See also my other posts on tags: To Tag or Not To Tag and The Persistence of Tags.

Some further tag example sites:

• A nice list at Joe Lamantia's post
• Culture Cloud, a site with clouds as a core metaphor
• Intro to the IBM Many Eyes tool
• Wordworks post in search of the perfect tag cloud
• One of my favs: Microsoft history

Text cloud creators:

• Tag Crowd
• Text Tag Cloud
• Chirag Mehta's Tagline Generator

Also, don't forget there are books:  one of the great classics in this are is Edward Tufte's famous The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Comments

[joelamantia]

Nice breakdown of the comparative differences between text clouds and tag clouds.

[Randy Thornton]

Thanks, Joe.

Your work on this subject is right on and very valuable. I have been using your ideas to help explain to faculty the teaching possibilities of these tools. Keep up the great work.