EDITOR
Jonathan Grudin
jgrudin@microsoft.com
Most HCI history articles trace digital developments back to the 1980s, 1960s, or earlier. Information visualization is
moving so rapidly that it’s great to have a look back and glance forward on tag clouds, just over a decade old in digital
form, from leading visualization researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. —Jonathan Grudin
Tag Clouds and the Case
for Vernacular Visualization
Fernanda B. Viégas
IBM Research | viegasf@us.ibm.com
Martin Wattenberg
IBM Research | mwatten@us.ibm.com
This is an exciting moment
for visualization. It’s a time
when the mainstream media
is embracing sophisticated
techniques born in university
research labs—a time when you
can open The New York Times
and see complex treemaps and
network diagrams. But just as
exciting is the fact that some
new visualizations, ones that
get people talking and thinking
about data in a new way, are
emerging from outside the academy as well.
This is starting to happen
often enough that it’s worth
coining a term for techniques
that originate outside the
research community. Borrowing
terminology from the design
world, we’ll call them “
vernacular” visualizations—in a nod to
Tibor Kalman’s admiration of
“low” art [ 1]. This article focuses
on one ubiquitous type of street-wise visualization: tag clouds.
Born outside the world of computers, they were raised to
maturity by Web 2.0 sites coping
with an unwieldy world of collective activity. Tag clouds are
an eclectic bunch spanning a
variety of data inputs and usage
patterns that defy much of the
orthodox wisdom about how
visualizations ought to work.
Tag Clouds: A history
The basic look of a tag cloud—a
combination of many different
type sizes in a single view—goes
back at least 90 years to Soviet
Constructivism. Beyond the surface style, however, a tag cloud
usually has a particular purpose:
to present a visual overview of
a collection of text. By this criterion, the first example may
have been the outcome of an
experiment carried out by social
psychologist Stanley Milgram in
1976 [ 2]. Milgram asked people
to name landmarks in Paris, and
then created a collective “mental
map” of the city using font size
to show how often each place
was mentioned (Figure 1).
Almost 20 years later, similar diagrams were created by a
computer—but a fictional one.
In Microserfs, Douglas Coupland’s
1995 novel, one of the characters writes a program to pick
out random phrases from his
electronic diary; the resulting
“subconscious files” are reproduced in the book.
In 1997 real life caught up
with Milgram’s collective unconscious and Coupland’s fictional
computer. That year programmer Jim Flanagan wanted a way
to show which search terms
had led people to his website.
Varying type sizes was easy;
in a page defined by HTML, he
created a simple Perl script—
“Search Referral Zeitgeist”—and
the resulting graphic was eye-catching. However Flanagan’s
script remained an obscure
curiosity.
By 2001 clouds of words
worked their way into mainstream media when Fortune
magazine brought the “cloud
aesthetic” to the world of
finance [ 3]. A piece entitled
“Money Makes the World Go
’Round” mapped the corporate
landscape with circular masses
of text showing the 500 largest
corporations in the world, each
cloud representing companies in
a particular country (Figure 2).
According to the graphic’s creator, John Tomanio, this was an
independent invention. Perhaps
[ 1] Kalman, Tibor, Peter
Hall, Michael Bierut, and
Tibor Kalman. Perverse
Optimist. Princeton,
N. J.:Princeton
Architectural Press,
2000.
[ 2] Milgram, Stanley,
and D. Jodelet.
“Psychological Maps of
Paris.” In Environmental
Psychology, edited by
W. I. H. Proshansky and
L. Rivlin, 104–124. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston. 1976.
[ 3] “Money Makes the
World Go ‘Round.”
Fortune. 23 July 2001.
< http://money.cnn.
com/magazines/
fortune/fortune_
archive/2001/07/23/
307384/ index.htm>
[ 4] Maeda, John. “The
Greatest Diagram of
2004.” Simplicity Blog,
14 March 2005 <http://
weblogs.media.mit.
edu/SIMPLICITY/
archives/ 000164.html>