A Play With Words

My sister showed me an interesting website.  “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide”.  So, you go onto the site, pop in some words, a website (blog or even something like www.nytimes.com), and it will serve you a ‘Word Cloud’ - the word cloud is an accumulation of words most used on the site/text you submitted. You can personalize them (layout/color/text) and share it.  It follows the growing trend of data visualizations (examples found here, here, and here).

I posted here the Obama and McCain acceptance speeches.  Can you tell which word cloud belongs to who?  I think it’s a creative way to analyze political tactics; how often do politicians use certain words and what they are trying to achieve with their speech?  Well, see below. The bigger the word, the more it’s used.