Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Reaction: TIMELINES: Tag clouds and the case for vernacular visualization

   This paper digs back to the origin of tag cloud visualization and how it evolved as time went by. Tag clouds are typically used to depict metadata tags, These tags are nothing but single word texts whose font size and color vary according to their importance and thus helping in identifying the prominent texts. Tag clouds are first introduced by a social psychologist and a fictional character. It got in to better form when Flickr used this visualization technique to show the popularity of various tags. Following Flickr many sites adopted tag clouds and it soon became a hallmark for web. John Meda declared Tag cloud  as "The Greatest Diagram of 2004".Apart from aggregating the tags in one whole view it can be used for analytical purpose too, It is majorly used to do a quick scan of a collection of Documents. IBM has brought up  a new version of TagCloud which uses Two words text, I don't think this is much of a change. TagClouds are now a renowned InfoViz technique even though it does not follow rules of Visualization and it is not born from Visualization. The author says that Tag Clouds is best  and painless tool for analyzing individual's personality Ex: Tag Cloud of Political speeches will aid in analyzing the politician's personality.

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