Sometimes you just want to look at the various tools of the Internet and find out interesting things regarding the politicians you are watching run for office. A tool called Wordle takes strings of text and then creates a cloud of the most used words. I used the “mostly horizontal, black and white, and set the maximum number of words at 200” settings to create the following Wordle clouds. I used the NY Times transcript of the debate as my source material. Using the transcript I then cut out the moderator commentary and then sliced Governor Palin’s comments and Senator Biden’s comments into two separate documents.
The following is the Wordle clouds.
Senator Biden
(click here to see a larger version 506kb)
Governor Palin
(click here to see a larger version 486kb)
I wouldn’t put to much into analyzing these word clouds I just thought it was interesting that there was some interesting patterns to be found.
Why is Biden’s wordle cloud larger? Did he use more words? Or simply speak them more loudly?
No idea and I was kind of wondering too. I tried to make every setting exactly the same . Go ahead and grab the data from the links and try it. See what you come up with.