Getting our head in the clouds

Tagclouds are visual presentations of a set of words, typically a set of "tags" selected by some rationale, in which attributes of the text such as size, weight, or color are used to represent features, such as frequency, of the associated terms. This note describes two studies to evaluate the effectiveness of differently constructed tagclouds for the various tasks they can be used to support, including searching, browsing, impression formation and recognition. Based on these studies, we propose a paradigm for evaluating tagclouds and ultimately guidelines for tagcloud construction.