First Debate Wordled: Obama
Politics
- 08
- 29
- 9
I’ve written about wordle before, and I am still completely blown away by how useful it is at conveying information without completely removing the context. I feel that this sort of word count analysis has been especially useful in the current political setting. The New York Times used this method recently to compare the Democrats and Republicans during their conventions this year.
Below is a wordle I created using Obama’s portions of transcript of the first presidential debate. Before simply copying and pasting the transcript into the wordle creator I parsed the text myself in order to remove words and phrases that would simply clutter and overshadow the key issues mentioned during the debate – from over 4000 words to about 1500. You can find the text file here.
I’ll post McCain’s portion of the debate soon.
UPDATE: I’ve posted it here.
4 Comments
1.
katie | September 29, 2008 at 1:26 pm
i don’t see pockiston anywhere on there!!
i kid i kid. very cool!!
2.
Dave Wood | September 29, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Wish you’d have left “John” in there. I think it would be interesting to see the contrast in how often they actually addressed each other by name.
I don’t recall McCain ever saying “Barack”.
Regardless…this is interesting.
3.
Calvin | September 29, 2008 at 3:47 pm
BADASS! Nice work, I think this is really interesting. Afghanistan takes the cake over President?
4.
Patrick Micka | September 29, 2008 at 5:14 pm
@Dave Wood: Correct, he never used Obama’s first name during the debate.
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