Word/Tag Clouds

Traditional word clouds can be really useful as a visual summary of a text, the size of the word depends on how often it appears in the text, allowing the key points to be conveyed quickly. I have used these traditional word clouds to convey the specification points for GCSE Chemistry units.

In an interactive word cloud each word or 'tag' becomes a clickable link. I have found that these clouds work best with a list of keywords and with maximum sizing rather than linking to occurrence. An example is provided below, with key words about spreadsheets. In this example clicking a tag will search for "spreadsheet" and the text of the tag.

Tags can also be fitted into shapes that provide additional visual stimulus- for this to be effective a larger word list is needed and trying to size tags by frequency of occurrence makes shape fitting awkward but good results can be achieved:

Try it yourself at Tagul (excellent for interactive and shaped clouds) or Wordle (best for traditional clouds)