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…