On the lower left-hand side of this blog you’ll notice what is called a tag cloud: it’s a cluster of the words that people who have posted to this blog have “tagged” their postings with. For example, I’ll probably tag this posting with words like “technology,” “web 2.0,” and “wordle.” These tags allow other users to search the archive of the blog: if someone is interested in learning technologies, they can do so search for the word “technology” and all the posting that have been tagged with that word will appear. Tag clouds take all those tag words and display them as a cluster; moreover, the more times that a tag word appears, the larger it will appear in the cluster. That way, you can tell, at a glance, what are the popular themes across the blog postings. Continue reading Word Frequency Visualization with Wordle – Mark Morton
Tag: technology
Google Docs – Mark Morton
The purpose of technology is to allow us to do things more easily or more efficiently so that we have more time and energy to invent more technologies. That, at least, would seem to be one way of describing human history, from the invention of the wheel, to the steam engine, to the first vacuum-based hair-cutting systems. Whether this technological progress has had a positive impact on the human condition is, I think, open to debate. Personally, I rather doubt that we are any happier now than our predecessors were a century, three centuries, or thirty centuries ago. True, we don’t have to contend with the bubonic plague or demonic possession; but neither did our ancestors have to deal with TV shows involving Tyra Banks or with being on hold with Bell Canada for half an hour. Continue reading Google Docs – Mark Morton