Hello Maureen, If you have access to the ACM Digital Library, you'll find some articles that might be useful. For example, here is one that has some information on the visual properties of tag clouds:
Bateman, S., Gutwin, C., and Nacenta, M. 2008. Seeing things in the clouds: the effect of visual features on tag cloud selections. In *Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia* (Pittsburgh, PA, USA, June 19 - 21, 2008). HT '08. ACM, New York, NY, 193-202. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1379092.1379130 Here is a portion of the abstract: "Tag clouds are a popular method for visualizing and linking socially-organized information on websites. Tag clouds represent variables of interest (such as popularity) in the visual appearance of the keywords themselves - using text properties such as font size, weight, or colour. Although tag clouds are becoming common, there is still little information about which visual features of tags draw the attention of viewers. As tag clouds attempt to represent a wider range of variables with a wider range of visual properties, it becomes difficult to predict what will appear visually important to a viewer. To investigate this issue, we carried out an exploratory study that asked users to select tags from clouds that manipulated nine visual properties. Our results show that font size and font weight have stronger effects than intensity, number of characters, or tag area; but when several visual properties are manipulated at once, there is no one property that stands out above the others." A few more Web references: Kasser, O., & Lemire, D. Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization. Proc. Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization Workshop. In conjunction with WWW '07. 10 pages. Available at www2007.org/workshops/paper_12.pdf Hassan-Montero, Y., & Herrero-Solana, V. Improving tag-clouds as visual information retrieval interfaces. Proc. InfoSciT2006. 6 pages. Available at http://www.nosolousabilidad.com/hassan/ improving_tagclouds.pdf Zeldman, J. Tag clouds are the new mullets. Accessed Sept. 8, 2007. http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0405d.shtml You might deconstruct tag clouds into goals, objects, and attributes and look at the consequences of changes in those items: Number of items presented Algorithms for sizing Size difference to input difference Color Font Ordering (alpha versus most frequent to least frequent) Size of text Goals and whether there is a user goal that calls for tag clouds Degree of clutter of the cloud Number of words allowed in an item in the cloud Using other variables beside frequency to create the cloud Adjusting the tag cloud (look at the cloud by gender/age/and other variables. I might be curious what items are popular with "Interaction designers" for example. Chauncey .......... On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 1:32 PM, USABILITY MEDIC <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi All, > > Does anyone know of any resources regarding the drawbacks of tag clouds or > the debate about their value versus their drawbacks. I have a bee in my > bonnet about them and would like write a point of view but want to do > appropriate research first. I found one previous thread herein and intend > to google into the wee hours but if anyone can help shorten my research time > by pointing me in a direction, I'd be most appreciative. > > And of course, if anyone in the group has opinions, they are most welcome > as well J > > Thanks, > Maureen > > > Maureen Murphy > President > > > > > > > 516-670-8000 > www.usabilitymedic.com > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [email protected] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
