I decided just for fun to make wordles out of the four major speeches from the two major political conventions this year. Wordle is an online application that makes images out of large blocks of text. The more frequently a word is used, the larger it appears in the image.
I don’t know if there are any major revelations to be gathered from these, but I think they are interesting to look at.
Here they are, in chronological order (click each image to view larger):
A few quick observations:
1. Both VP nominees talked a lot about their respective running mates.
2. The Democrats talked about John McCain more than the Republicans talked about Barack Obama.
3. John McCain’s most used verb appears to be ‘Fight’. Barack Obama’s appears to be ‘Work’. (I’m assuming ‘Promise’ is generally used as a noun in Obama’s speeches, but I could be wrong.)
Anyone else have any interesting observations?









Kyle
That is pretty neat, I like how McCain’s top three word are country, fight and Americans. If you put the middle word fight with either Americans or country and a less weighted words you get some interesting lines. Example: ‘Americans fight government’ or ‘country fight president’. It is also interesting to not see Barack’s name in the either of the oppositions speeches.
Comment — September 5, 2008 @ 5:31 pm