New work by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg: This is an exciting moment for visualization. It’s a time when the mainstream media are 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 being invented outside the academy as well. This is starting to happen often enough that it’s worth having 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. This article focuses on one ubiquitous type of streetwise 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 ...
(Unfortunately, ACM subscription required for full text) From the archive: My research focuses on the visualization of the traces people leave as they interact online. Some of my projects explore email archives, newsgroup conversations, and the editing history of wiki pages. I am particularly fascinated by the stories that these social archives tell us and the patterns they contain.
Martin is a mathematician whose research interests include information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, bioinformatics, and art.
Wattenberg’s investigation into the shape of song is part of his overall mission to make the invisible visible.
Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization | 
