Tag/Word clouds

Took a break from grading to see if I could figure out how to make tag clouds. These are neat graphical ways to highlight what things are prominent within a set of words - these words could be on a web page, a journal article, or whatever text you want to supply. In my case I wanted to see if this would accurately represent to the students what my course was about.

A quick search pulled up a number of free online tools to do this. I randomly chose http://www.tagxedo.com/.  I literally copied and pasted all of my notes into the entry box, chose a color scheme, and then chose the shape of my cloud (bacterial-shaped of course). Here's what I got for the lecture and the lab. 

Tag/Word cloud for my lab: 

 Tag/Word cloud for my lecture:

Pretty cool and honestly not a bad representation of the lab and lecture parts of the course. Basically it uses an algorithm to weight the font size by the frequency of the word, then fits the words into the shape. 

Actually I could see this being a neat way to show microbial community composition too. Tried it with Ben's fungi data from the Elon Forest. Added a new twist to - instead of capturing an image here is an iFrame of it so that it can be dynamic (see earlier post on Widgets). Scroll over the names to see the magic. Note that the shape is a nice oaklike tree - nice little touch although why can't they supply a fungus icon for us?