Posts Tagged ‘visua’
Political Wordles: Opening Election Speaches by the Leader’s of three Canadian Political Parties
Wordle is a new visualization toy that creates word clouds from blocks of texts (blog posts, books, stories, speeches, etc.) in which the size of a word represents that word’s relative frequency compared to other words in the text. I’ve been playing with Wordle for the last couple days, mostly using texts from the history of psychology (old journal articles) as preparation for a possible future thesis project. Yesterday I decided to use the opening election speeches from three of Canada’s national political parties, the Conservative Party of Canada, the Liberal party of Canada, and the New Democrat Party. I have not included anything from the Green Party of Canada or the Bloc Quebecois because I could not find comparitive material.
Stephen Harper, Sept. 7. 2008 – Election a choice between certainty and risk:
Stephane Dion, Sept. 7, 2008 – A new path for Canada:
Jack Layton, Sept. 7, 2008 – Its time to choose change:
Conclusions:
- I do not pretend that these kind of graphs meen anything conclusive.
- Its interesting how prominant the words “promised” and “delivered” are in Harper’s speech.
- All three speeches use variations of Canada and Canadians extensively.
- Jack Layton’s speech seems to be chanelling Obama a little, with prominant use of the words “change” “believe” and “can”. It would be interesting to do a comparitive word cloud and see just how close they really are.
- That said, Harper’s speech seems to be better ballanced, word frequency wise, and contain more “issue” words than either the NDP or Liberal party speeches.
