Just finished a very cold mile walk (23f/-5c) to the coffee shop where, after warming my hads around a tall decaf, I’m writing about tag clouds. In looking for examples, I ran across Pollster.com, where they have posted two blog entries that include tag clouds of the presidential debates. On April 27 they included the democratic contenders, and on May 4, they posted the republicans’.
It’s interesting to compare Clinton’s cloud with those of the other candidates. She has very few big words, meaning that there are not a lot of words and terms that she uses repeatedly.
What does this say about the candidates? Is this a useful tool for analyzing and comparing our choices? Certainly not in its self.
But what might students learn if they could generate tag clouds for the chapters of their textbooks?
Check out TagCrowd (http://tagcrowd.com).
