If the question is Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud? The answer is… they are exactly the same dummy! except of less value because lots of the words haven’t been carefully selected by humans, so you end with a lot of words like “the” and “and” and “where”. Now, of course you can remove a set of stop words but knowing when a stopword is a stopword becomes quite tricky. At first glance it seems easy, then you realise that there are words you want to exempt from the stopword list in this particualr case.
I’ve been doing some experimenting with “Text Clouds” lateley, creating one for a collection of competitiors’ web sites to help me see which keywords they are using most heavily and it has thrown up some interesting results. The good thing about them is that it gives you data that you can intuit… If it had have been a table most peoples’ brains would just fizz and make no sense of what is in front of them, but “Text Clouds” let you almost feel the differences.
Of course, Text Clouds-for-Phrases (two, three or four words) are where I’m heading. Because the word web most often hangs out with design and site, sometimes development. But then displaying web‘s relationship with both design and development becomes visually difficult. Should they be next to each other, overlayed… it’s harder than it sounds, trust me.
Maybe tag/text clouds are good at what they do because they are dumb and simple, forcing us to be more than smart, look at a collection of words, ignore the ones that don’t mattter and make some sense out of them, having had a smattering of help from a computer.
Imagine someone having watched the film of Ulysses a saying, “Yeah, but it wasn’t as good as the Text Cloud”.
Great point about word phrases improving the utility of text clouds that are used to enhance comprehension. Can you share some of your experiments?
Context is oftne quite different for any single instance of a word (or a tag), meaning there’s need for units of structure annd manipulation bigger than the single word, both in tag clouds and text clouds.
Which might give us “phrase clouds” in the world of text clouds, and something else in the realm of tags…
There are some tools for lexical analysis that work with and help identify common and meaningful series of words as sentence fragments and phrases. But I don’t think any of them are freely available as web-accessible services, which means they are not part of the new semantic ecosystem that nrtures text clouds. Do you know of any?
And you’re exactly right about the way that text clouds can only contribute to understanding, not take it’s place.