:: netwoman's blog ::

information searches

In the cracks & crevices of paid work, I've been working on my thesis. In short, my PhD thesis looks at how households use ICTs; I compare/contrast different household compositions (from living alone to partnered couples with children) to argue that household context matters, and that our ict use is shaped by this particular context. How we use ICTs (to schedule, to communicate, to lok for information etc) varies, which shows the social affordances of the internet (in particular). One of my chapters looks at information searches online specifically, and I had some good interview quotes on the kinds of things people search for. I coded these into key words and wondered how I could visually show the search terms without resorting to boring Xtabs and such. I remembered how I liked tag clouds and thought this might be useful to show my results.

I used Wordle:

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Wordle doesn't have html insert for blogs, so I used TagCloud as well.

I plopped the search terms of my participants in TagCrowd, and got my text cloud, and I think it's pretty neat as a data visualizer. Let's hope my committee thinks so as well. Health is key search item, which includes varied searches for the participant, for their friends and family, and importantly for the people in their homes (like children, partners or older parents).

posted by Netwoman @ 9:23 AM