Word Face-Off: word cloud

04 September 2008

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?

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)

08 August 2008

Obama vs. McCain

Now that the two main candidates for president are known, let's have a look at how they've fared these last four years.

Google Trends yields this graph:

Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of obama in all years.
obama 1.00
mccain 0.80

A. McCain in command; Obama, Clinton battle
Concord Monitor - Feb 6 2008;
B. Obama, McCain win in Wisconsin
The Herald - Feb 20 2008;
C. Obama thanks Obama
Cape Times (subscription) - Mar 5 2008;
D. Clinton wins in Indiana, Obama wins NC
AZ Central.com - May 7 2008;
E. Obama clinches nomination
Hindu - Jun 4 2008;
F. Obama in Berlin
OpEdNews - Jul 24 2008;

Bottomline: Obama was more often in the press in the past too, this is not just a recent phenomenon.

Update 8-17-08: The Boston Globe has a very interesting comparison of the frequency of specific words on Obama and McCain's blogs, in the form of "word piles":