Tag Clouds

In my new qualitative research class tonight, the topic of tag clouds (for some nice examples, see this wikipedia article) came up as a means of visualizing qualitative research data. I hadn't thought about using them in this way, but I can most definitely see their usefulness. I searched google and found a program free online called TagCrowd that is easy to use and generates nice-looking tag clouds. You can either import a plain text document (of say an interview or observation) or you can point it to a website (like a blog or a wiki) and it then takes the most frequently used words (ignoring common words like "the" and "of") and makes a tag cloud showing the which words were used more frequently by corresponding text size. It also give you the html code of the cloud so that you can add your tag cloud to your web site (which I have done below on a practice interview about learning to read) or you could just take a screenshot and add it to a word doc or leave it as is to save locally. There are a few other features such as being able to rearrange the words in the cloud which seem handy as well. This may be a good way to get over the hump and start finding codes.

able actual ah anything bible books chair children church dad describe else er experience front golden help home house laughs learning living looking lot memories mom music okay pause piano pictures play preschool process read really remember room specific stories sure teacher think uh um understanding used voice whatever yeah

created at TagCrowd.com