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Word clouds considered harmful | Nieman Journalism Lab

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In his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson created a character named Cayce Pollard with an unusual psychosomatic affliction: She was allergic to brands. Even the logos on clothing were enough to make her skin crawl, but her worst reactions were triggered by the Michelin Tire mascot, Bibendum. Although it’s mildly satirical, I can relate to this condition, since I have a similar visceral reaction to word clouds, especially those produced as data visualization for stories. If you are fortunate enough to have no idea what a word cloud is, here is some background. A word cloud represents word usage in a document by resizing individual words in said document proportionally to how frequently they are used, and then jumbling them into some vaguely artistic arrangement. This technique first originated online in the 1990s as tag clouds (famously described as “the mullets of the Internet“), which were used to display the popularity of keywords in bookmarks. More recently, a site named

Word clouds considered harmful | Nieman Journalism Lab tag on every page of your site. --> HOME About Fuego --> Encyclo --> Subscribe Archives Foundation Reports Storyboard LATEST STORY How America’s newspapers lost their voice Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production ABOUT SUBSCRIBE Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production Encyclo --> Translations Fuego --> Oct. 13, 2011, 1:45 p.m. Word clouds considered harmful The New York Times senior software architect would like the newest &#

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