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CHAPTER ONE Visuals Word Clouds A word cloud is a visual repre­sen­ta­tion of text. Also called tag clouds, they provide readers with a power­ful way to look at text. The word cloud contains pieces of text that are put into a list. The size or weight of the word in the final word cloud is determined by how many times the word appears in the text. The more times a word is included, the larger the word ­will be in the word cloud. Tags, or words, are usually single words.­ There are hundreds of uses for word clouds in education, and librari- ans can use word clouds for a variety of book promotion activities. Any text can be turned into a word cloud and then printed, embedded into a web page, or added to social media. ­ Here are some ideas for using word clouds in book promotion: • Create a word cloud of an author’s work. The word cloud can use just the titles of books or use the genres of the books to show what genres the author writes in. • Create a word cloud that stresses titles in a genre. Add several titles of books into the tag list, and create the word cloud from ­there. • Create a word cloud that highlights the most impor­tant aspects of a novel. • Create a word cloud for book shelves that draws attention to the titles in the section. Use several titles from one book shelf or one section of shelves. • Create contests for ­ children to guess the book represented in the word cloud. You can emphasize character names to help the kids figure out the book.