Michelle Obama vs. Joe Biden vs. Barack Obama vs. Sarah Palin vs. Cindy McCain vs. John McCain

Tonight I changed the format: let's compare the convention speeches of the 2 main-party presidential tickets and the spouses. I took the transcripts from the official convention websites. I looked how many words they used. Also, how many sentences and characters (excl. spaces) did the speeches have? I summarized these three measures in a bubble graph:



Another way of comparing these "bunches" of words is by means of word clouds whereby the larger a word, the more frequently it occurs in the speech (using Wordle). They're all the rage, aren't they?


Copyright Newshour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) (CC Attribution Noncommercial license).




Copyright rklau (CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike license).




Copyright Newshour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) (CC Attribution Noncommercial license).




Copyright Newshour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) (CC Attribution Noncommercial license).




Copyright Newshour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) (CC Attribution Noncommercial license).




Copyright Newshour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) (CC Attribution Noncommercial license).


I'll let you draw your own conclusions this time.
Update 10-5-08: As I explain in this new post, Wordle has a lot more settings than I was aware of. Here are the improved, "corrected" word clouds.

Michelle Obama (improved)



Joe Biden (improved)



Barack Obama (improved)



Sarah Palin (improved)



Cindy McCain (improved)



John McCain (improved)