Tag clouds
By sylvie | July 23, 2008
An interesting article by Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg entitled Tag clouds and the case for vernacular visualization published in Interactions, vol. XV issue 4 (July-August) 2008, pp. 49-52. They present a history of tag clouds, the technique’s flaws (oh, interesting, a study shows that people fare worse at understanding when presented with tag clouds than with simple vertical lists of words), and some of the uses that these clouds are being put to.
Good paper if you’re doing any kind of research having to do with tags and tagging.
Topics: Tags |
July 23rd, 2008 at 18:29
a study shows that people fare worse at understanding when presented with tag clouds than with simple vertical lists of words
No, that’s not what Rivadeneira et al. have shown. Their paper is excellent, but I think you extrapolate a bit too much from what they did show.
July 24th, 2008 at 6:45
Ah well, I was extrapolating from what Viegas and Wattenberg said. I’ll have to go read the paper itself then.