Look at the graphic below and see what it seems to suggest before I tell you.
It's
a screenshot from a chart that shows the most popular names for girl
babies in Austria last year. But the point of my sharing it is not
about Austria, or even baby names (and certainly not that my nom de
plume is on it). I share it as a great little sample of 21st century
"Info Art" in which words and numbers become something much more than
the sum of their parts.
If you are familiar with "tag clouds" on blogs like mine, then you know without being told that the larger words have the most weight (in this case, popular with Austrian mothers of new baby girls). What you wouldn't know unless I filled in the blanks. is that it was made by uploading a spreadsheet of data to a free public site run by the Watson Reseach Center at IBM, where an online algorithim rendered it into this information graphic (yes, you can pick your own colors). The site, Many Eyes, is another great example of the Win-Win Web in which all participants benefit. They say their goal in offering it for free is to "democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis." Not to mention it's a nice public service from IBM. Word clouds are only one of the ways that Many Eyes can take your alpha-numeric data and turn it into a nifty info graphic. Use the following links to jump into ther visualizations yourself, take a tour, or read the rest of their "About" page.
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