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et al.: word cloud comparison of Obama/Clinton Iowa remarks
By WDavidStephenson | January 7, 2008
I thought it might be illustrative as we head into the last day of the New Hampshire campaign to do a side-by side comparison of Many Eyes word clouds (vs. tag clouds…) I created of Obama’s and Clinton’s remarks after the Iowa caucuses, to see which words they emphasized. This, in turn, might highlight differences in their strategies and values.NB: I’m a Obama supporter, so approach this skeptically!
What I did was a count of the 5 words each used most frequently (excluding what, in my mind, were simply generic ones that weren’t value laden. Also, these are ranked in terms of frequency, rather than absolute number of times, since Clinton’s remarks were shorter).
Here are the two word clouds, followed by the comparison (sorry it’s not in chart form — can’t find any documentation and/or tips about how to create WordPress tables):
Clinton
- people
- country
- campaign/president/work
- make
- care/change
Obama:
- hope
- America
- change
- moment
- nation
present
My take is that, consistent with the themes they’ve concentrated in the past few days, Clinton emphasizes competence (”campaign, President, make, work”), while Obama stresses the elusive “change” goal (”hope,” “change”
We’ll see which is more compelling!
Technorati tags: election presidential campaign Democrats Hillary Clinton Barack Obama New Hampshire Primary politics Many Eyesdata visualization
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