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I'm a big fan of visualising data in order to communication information. At the moment I am using word clouds to help me interrograte some of 8bits' larger projects.

Survey Analysis

I conducted a large survey for a university recently and viewed complex responses via a word cloud. This helped me to quickly and easily identify patterns. For example, where answers were consistent across respondents the word cloud highlighted the answers that were most popular by making them much larger than the other words in the cloud.

Alternatively, one of the questions prompted extremely diverse answers resulting in a much flatter word cloud.

Naturally, this did not replace detailed analysis, but certainly became a valuable part of my tool kit. The word clouds helped me to grasp information quickly & present it to management in an easily digestible format.

Research Analysis

Above is an example of my current delicious tags. As you can see I have been doing a lot of research on Library Web Strategy. Although I use many tools to prioritise & track my time, this visual representation shows me instantly where my focus has been.

Thanks to services such as Wordle, creating word clouds from text, websites and bookmarks is easily done.