Thing 19: Word (tag) clouds

Tag or word clouds first appeared on early Web 2.0 websites as Flickr and Delicious as a means of visualising the frequency of keyword metadata (or tags) used on these social websites. User tags on these websites are personal, subjective and not bound to any rules and are therefore very different from the official cataloguing world of library subject indexing  many of us are dealing with on a daily basis.

Nevertheless, since I'm currently working on producing a list of Artists' Film DVDs available in WSA Library using data taken from their Marc records, I decided to use this list to produce a word cloud and see which words (not just subject headings !!) are used most frequently.

This is the result:

I think we can conclude from this that Andy Warhol and Takahiko Iimura are the best represented artists in our collection. The words 'Video', 'Artists' and 'Filmmakers' also stand out, but that of course is not really surprising since we are dealing here with films made by artists.  I thought I had taken out the-not-so interesting words as 'Exploring', 'Includes', 'Works', 'The' and 'Min', but after saving the word cloud I noticed they were still in there. I shall have to do a little more experimenting with this fun little toy!