Tuesday 13 March 2007

The use of 'tag clouds' in text presentation/analysis/indexing?

Marcia Zeng posted today the following message to the NKOS (Networked Knowledge Organization Systems) list:

    Everyone knows about the 'tag cloud' approach when showing popular tags. How about using this same idea for presenting keywords in documents and making a dynamic cloud which matches a particular event? Here are some examples I found interesting.

    US Presidential Speeches Aging Tag Cloud Timeline
    The tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2007 AD.

    Microsoft's evolution, in keywords
    At both case, there is a timeline on the top. Move the slider around for a unique glimpse into the document of a particular time.

    Information about tagline generator is at:
    http://chir.ag/tech/download/tagline/

2 comments:

Marcin Roszkowski said...

I'm thinking about effectivenes of using Tagline's clouds to some LIS conference websites. Although it is based only on word statistics, it may give some broad view of "the picture of document." Maybe we should do some tests with Tagline clouds on classic LIS texts, e.g Ranganathan? It would be fun for sure.

With regards
Marcin Roszkowski
ISKO Polish Chapter

Bob Bater said...

Tag clouds are, apparently, not the only means of visualizing these sorts of data. A range of visualization 'modes' are available online at the IBM Alphaworks experimental site. This example looks at MARC indicators.