Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?

Dur­ing 2006, tag clouds moved beyond their well-known role as nav­i­ga­tion mech­a­nisms and indi­ca­tors of activ­ity within social media expe­ri­ences, emerg­ing as a stan­dard visu­al­iza­tion tech­nique for texts and tex­tual data in gen­eral.
This use of tag clouds does not com­monly involve tags, social net­works, emer­gent archi­tec­tures, folk­sonomies, or meta­data.
“Text cloud” might be a more accu­rate label for these visu­al­iza­tions than tag cloud. In addi­tion to rec­og­niz­ing fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences — text clouds dif­fer from tag clouds in com­po­si­tion (no tags at all) and pur­pose (pre­dom­i­nantly com­pre­hen­sion, rather than access or nav­i­ga­tion) — dis­tin­guish­ing the two types of clouds will make it much eas­ier to assess their abil­i­ties to sup­port user expe­ri­ence needs and busi­ness goals.
The emer­gence of this new form of text cloud looks like a good exam­ple of spe­ci­a­tion in action (though it’s too early to tell whether the end result will be clado­ge­n­e­sis or ana­ge­n­e­sis).
Major and minor pub­li­ca­tions feature(d) text clouds as visu­al­iza­tions in 2006, both per­ma­nently and temporarily:

The Economist’s Text cloud

In 2006, sev­eral free and pub­lic tools for gen­er­at­ing text clouds locally on the desk­top or via a ser­vice avail­able through the Web were released. The increase in the num­ber and vari­ety of spe­cific text cloud tools reflects embrace and enthu­si­asm for text clouds in com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est for infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion, lan­guage pro­cess­ing, and seman­tics.
Some of the bet­ter known exam­ples of text cloud tools include:

The Many Eyes Cloud

The text clouds cre­ated with these tools range across a wide spec­trum of speeches and writing:

Text clouds are meant to facil­i­tate rapid under­stand­ing and com­pre­hen­sion of a body of words, links, phrases, etc. Any block of infor­ma­tion com­posed of text is open to analy­sis as a text cloud, as these screen cap­tures of text clouds for restau­rant menus, ingre­di­ents, wikipedia, mag­a­zine cov­ers, and even poems demon­strate.
Tim O’Reilly uses text clouds for a num­ber of pur­poses:

We used them a bunch to ana­lyze the top­ics, com­pa­nies and peo­ple at the last FOO Camp, and they were the most use­ful of the visu­al­iza­tions we did. They helped us see where we were under– and over-represented in terms of com­pa­nies and par­tic­u­lar tech­nolo­gies we were want­ing to explore. …So they have many uses beyond just show­ing what we nor­mally think of as tags.
Non-linear Access
The emer­gence of text clouds shows con­tin­u­ing explo­ration and refine­ment of cloud style dis­plays as a new form of user inter­face, adapted to spe­cific con­texts. Con­tin­ued refine­ment of text clouds in this direc­tion may indi­cate an expand­ing role for com­monly avail­able and sophis­ti­cated text visu­al­iza­tion tools to sup­port spe­cial­ized goals for infor­ma­tion dis­play and under­stand­ing.
Remem­ber that Google is busy right now scan­ning thou­sands of books per day from sev­eral of the world’s major aca­d­e­mic libraries, as part of it’s self-appointed labor of orga­niz­ing the world’s infor­ma­tion. That’s a lot of new text. How will peo­ple work with effec­tively with such an over­whelm­ing amount of text, of so many dif­fer­ent kinds, from so many dif­fer­ent sources?
Con­sider the fol­low­ing, from Ulysses’ With­out Guilt by Stacy Schiff (in the New York Times):
Recently Cath­leen Black, pres­i­dent of Hearst Mag­a­zines, urged a group of pub­lish­ing exec­u­tives to think of their audi­ence as con­sumers rather than read­ers. She’s onto some­thing: arguably the very def­i­n­i­tion of read­ing has changed. So Google asserts in defend­ing its right to scan copy­righted mate­ri­als. The process of dig­i­tiz­ing books trans­forms them, the com­pany con­tends, into some­thing else; our engage­ment with a text is dif­fer­ent when we call it up online. We are no longer read­ing. We’re search­ing — a func­tion that con­ve­niently did not exist when the con­cept of copy­right was estab­lished.
On a larger scale, the grow­ing use of text clouds hints at a (poten­tial) deeper cul­tural shift in the way we go about read­ing and com­pre­hen­sion: a shift from lin­ear modes based on read­ing words and sen­tences, to non­lin­ear modes based on view­ing sum­maries of con­tent in aggre­gate as a way of dis­cov­er­ing con­cepts and pat­terns. (Finally, a legit­i­mate use for Twit­ter…) Exper­i­ment­ing with text clouds for non-linear read­ing and com­pre­hen­sion (now that’s a sexy term…) is a nat­ural evo­lu­tion of the role cloud style dis­plays play as an alter­na­tive / com­pli­ment / sup­ple­ment to the list based nav­i­ga­tion now dom­i­nant in user expe­ri­ences.
A Text Cloud of Twit­ter Posts (A Twit­ter­Cloud?)

cre­ated at TagCrowd.com


I’m not pre­dict­ing the end of read­ing as we know it, nor the end of nav­i­ga­tion as we know it: both will be with us for a long, long time. But I do believe that text clouds might con­sti­tute an emerg­ing method for aug­ment­ing com­pre­hen­sion and dis­play of text, with broad poten­tial uses.
Enter­pris­ing Clouds
What about some­one lack­ing time to fully read a Shake­speare play, or a fad­dish busi­ness book, but who needs to under­stand some­thing about that book’s mean­ing and sub­stance? A text cloud cre­ation tool could extract the most com­monly men­tioned terms, and oth­er­wise pro­file the words that make up the text. It would be risky to rely on a shal­low text cloud (and Tim O’Reilly men­tions this specif­i­cally) for deep com­pre­hen­sion, but it would be enough to under­stand the con­cepts that appear, and allow polite con­ver­sa­tion at a net­work­ing event, or lunch with that cer­tain man­ager who rec­om­mended the book.
If I were entre­pre­neur­ial, I’d source a set of free elec­tronic ver­sions of clas­sic texts, process them with one of the free text cloud tools, apply some XSLT and other trans­for­ma­tions to gen­er­ate con­sis­tent read­able for­mat­ting, and sell the results as a line of ebooks called “Cloud Notes”. Of course, someone’s beaten me to it already…
What’s in store for the future?
In this fash­ion, text clouds may become a gen­er­ally applied tool for man­ag­ing grow­ing infor­ma­tion over­load by using auto­mated syn­the­sis and sum­ma­riza­tion. In the infor­ma­tion sat­u­rated future (or the infor­ma­tion sat­u­rated present), text clouds are the com­mon exec­u­tive sum­mary on steroids and acid simul­ta­ne­ously; assem­bled with mus­cu­lar syn­tac­ti­cal and seman­tic pro­cess­ing, and fed to reading-fatigued post-literates as swirling blobs of giant words in wild col­ors, it con­sists of sig­ni­fiers for rei­fied con­cepts that tweak the eye-brain-language con­duit directly.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • connotea
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Posterous
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • MySpace
  • Slashdot
  • email

Category: Tag Clouds
 Tags: , , , , , 12 comments »

12 Responses to “Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?”

  1. Stewart McKie
    March 22nd, 2007 at 5:21 pm

    Joe
    Another great post. Visu­al­iza­tion is clearly an impor­tant ben­e­fit of a textcloud but also con­sider the ana­lyt­i­cal value of hav­ing a lot of text clouds about a spe­cific topic. Tag pop­u­lar­ity is web 1.0. Applied text cloud ana­lyt­ics is web 2.0.
    Best
    Stewart
  2. Greg Weller
    March 27th, 2007 at 9:01 am

    Joe — very inter­est­ing post. You might be inter­ested in some of the tag clouds I’ve done on Many-Eyes, includ­ing 6 dif­fer­ent edi­tions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.(my stuff is located at the above URl) I’m work­ing on the idea now of a lit­er­ary mashup of tag clouds: take two or more works with sim­i­lar themes (Say Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and Shakespeare’s Mid­sum­mer Nights Dream, com­bine the two texts and tag cloud (or text cloud) them. It’s some­thing like William S. Bur­roughs’ cut up tech­nique meets Web 2.0.
  3. Jonah Keegan
    April 12th, 2007 at 6:07 pm

    Joe, I won’t repeat the praise but great sur­vey of the progress this com­mu­ni­ca­tion has made. Also wanted to point you to my own small con­tri­bu­tion to tag/text/word cloud­ing. Not the deep­est exam­ple of the meme, but not the shal­low­est either I think. :o )
    http://snapshirts.com/
  4. joe lamantia
    April 13th, 2007 at 5:52 pm

    Jonah: I love all the new busi­nesses pop­ping up around clouds these days — it’s encour­ag­ing to see so much entre­pre­neurism (?) in a new space. Good luck with snap­shirt!
    Greg: Nice work — I learned about ManyEyes at IDEA2006, and am glad to see peo­ple putting it to inter­est­ing and artisitic uses right away
    Stew­art: Could you share some of the more inter­est­ing exam­ples of clouds from Script­cloud that you’ve seen?
  5. Warren Apel
    May 15th, 2007 at 11:46 am

    I like the idea of using text clouds to dis­play non-tag data. In this ManyEyes graph (URL below) I used font size to dis­play the rel­a­tive sizes of uni­ver­sity endow­ments. I’m work­ing on some sim­i­lar data dis­plays that show world pop­u­la­tion, etc. I think it’s a great way to put lots of infor­ma­tion in an easy-to-read but com­pact space. Much more data dense than a bar graph!
    http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/Sh3S9FsOtha6Qj-yrrjGF2–
  6. Arnab Ganguly
    May 21st, 2007 at 5:19 am

    The ques­tion arises is the usabil­ity of Tag Clouds. Do they really help vis­i­tors. What does it mean to a nor­mal vis­i­tor, how often they are clicked through.
  7. andrew
    May 28th, 2007 at 5:02 am

    i don’t really believe this kind of clouds are use­ful from a SEO point of view…too many unre­lated links on a page
    just my opin­ion though..
  8. Tsu Dho Nimh
    July 1st, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    Joe -
    Text clouds would be good for show­ing novice writ­ers that they are not focused on what they think they are focused on, but with­out the mechan­i­cal “key­word den­sity” cal­cu­la­tions.
    For exam­ple, if you are writ­ing a prod­uct review, the prod­uct type, the name of the man­u­fac­turer, the product’s name, and some verbs and nouns relat­ing to that the prod­uct is used for should show up promi­nently in the cloud.
    You need to use a gen­er­a­tor that has a stop list, of course. I’m using the gen­er­a­tor at tagcrowd.com and it’s really nice.
  9. sasha
    September 23rd, 2008 at 1:30 am

    Check out http://www.cloudtuner.com
  10. Figment Engine
    November 27th, 2008 at 6:43 am

    I’ve cre­ated a tag cloud that is ani­mated and shows the rela­tion­ships between tags based on co-occurance… check it out at
    Ani­mated Tag Cloud
  11. Eamon
    December 11th, 2008 at 7:25 am

    Fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing. Do text clouds have any­thing in com­mon with Grounded The­ory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory — a form of research where text is analysed so that impor­tant words iden­ti­fied and cod­ing of key­words takes place. I don’t know a lot about grounded the­ory but it sounds like some­thing that could ben­e­fit from text clouds or vice versa?
  12. joe lamantia
    December 11th, 2008 at 9:26 am

    Hi Eamon. I didn’t have Grounded The­ory specif­i­cally in mind while I was writ­ing about text clouds, but that doesn’t mean there’s no con­nec­tion. There are some text cloud analy­sis tools avail­able, but I’ve not heard any of the authors men­tion grounded the­ory in rela­tion.
    Maybe you’ve found a good thread to fol­low up on :)
    Think­ing broadly, almost all of the research / dis­cov­ery / insight meth­ods cur­rent in man­age­ment con­sult­ing and user expe­ri­ence are bor­rowed from dis­ci­plines like social sci­ences and cog­ni­tive sci­ences. If you look under the hood at many of these meth­ods I think it’s appar­ent that GT is an impor­tant com­po­nent and / or sig­nif­i­cant influ­encer. For exam­ple, I worked in an IT strat­egy and man­age­ment con­sult­ing group that relied on a method directly derived from GT (thought I’m sure this escaped most of the peo­ple involved in defin­ing it, iron­i­cally…)
    And on a more tech­ni­cal side, some of the con­cepts that GT relies on (cod­ing, cat­e­gories, etc.) are present in search, index­ing, and seman­tic tools.
    What sort of con­nec­tions do you see?

↑ Back to top