Tag Clouds - what are they?

You might have noticed that with the redevelopment of our website in recent months we have introduced three boxes on to the front page of our website, each containing what appears to be a jumble of different-sized archaeology-related words.

Mini tag clouds from our homepage

And there's more on our tags page:

More tag clouds

These are known as "tag clouds" and can help you to navigate around our website.

What are they for? Why are all of the words different sizes?

Each page on our website has key words attached to them. They can be seen just above the footer:

Keywords, or tags, are attached to each page on our website

We call these keywords "tags" and they can help us to identify important topics contained in pages, and can help to make our search facility more accurate. They can also help us to group pages outside of their normal, hierarchical, structure. Tags are stored in a central database, and by listing them on a page, we can see the large number of topics contained on our website. Tags used more frequently will appear in a larger font. This gives visual clues to the quantity of information on a particular topic that we currently have on our site.

The tag clouds dynamically change as we add more content, so that changes and topics can be easily spotted.

For example, if you look at the "Explore by Place" tag cloud on our homepage, at the time of writing the county of Surrey appears in very small text. Wiltshire is in the largest font size, and most prominent. We have published only one project from Surrey, but twelve from Wiltshire. If we were to publish some more of our Surrey-based projects, and not add anything from Wiltshire for a while, then the tag cloud will reflect this by increasing the size of the word "Surrey" and reducing the size of "Wiltshire", if projects from other counties overtook.

We hope that you find the tag clouds useful, or at least as a fun way of exploring our content.

Feel free to explore our "big" tag cloud on our tags page, which includes keywords, counties and periods, or read more about tag clouds on Wikipedia.