Clearing up campaign word clouds
Tagged Under : barack obama, obama, obama girl
Graphics known as tag clouds, which summarize chunks of text by weighting the font size of words based on frequency of use, have long been used to navigate the Web. Now they’re gaining traction as tools for armchair analysis of political rhetoric, thanks to Wordle, a tool that generates elegant word clouds from websites and blog feeds.
The Washington Post took word-cloud geekery mainstream this weekend, printing a pair of word clouds generated from the campaign blogs of John McCain and Barack Obama. The results:
Washington Post word clouds
As the mystery bloggers at Democracy In America note, it’s evidence that the presidential race is squarely focused on Barack Obama — “from afar both blogs look like they could belong to Obama girl.”
That’s a safe conclusion, considering the two biggest, bluest data points in the graphic. But are there other insights further down the size scale? One might be tempted to conclude that [...]
