I’ve been playing with a few information visualization tools lately. They’re actually really fun. The first is Wordle, a tool for creating and designing word clouds, and the second is Favthumbs, which can be used to visually browse through your del.icio.us bookmarks. Wordle is great for visualizing the words in a text or blog, as it represents the frequency of each word with size, colour, and typography.

http://beyondthebook.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/lear2.jpg I created this word cloud using the full text of my favourite Shakespeare play. I’m wondering if there are applications for these kinds of tools in the academic library, maybe related to information literacy and teaching, or just a creative way to represent things that are not typically visual?