Visual Analysis Of McCain's Acceptance Speech
Using Wordle, I've created a visual analysis (comparable to a tag cloud) of John McCain's acceptance speech. Wordle is a simple tool that allows us to use visual cues to illustrate word frequency. In this case, words that are "small" appear less frequently than words that are large.
This is not a "straight" visualization of the of the text of the speech. Instead, I have eliminated words that appeared fewer than three times. In addition, I normalized some words. Wordle automatically eliminates common words like "a" or "the." My methodology follows:
Normalization:
- America, American (adjective) : America
- American, Americans (noun) : Americans
- children, children's, child : children
- communities, community : community
- drill, drilling : drill
- get, getting, got : get
- help, helped : help
- idea, ideas : idea
- know, knows, knew : know
- mean, means, meant : mean
- opportunity, opportunities : opportunity
- see, saw : see
- stand up : stand-up
- teacher, teachers : teacher
- turn, turned : turn
- work, worked, works : work
Words Removed:
These words appeared fewer than three times:
answer ... broken ... done ... dangerous ... doesn't ... grateful ... long ... lot ... military ... months ... mother ... much ... Palin ... shake ... special ... time
However, I also created a Wordle visual with full text of the speech. Here is the modified Wordle image; here is the unmodified image.
Watch the full speech on UStreamTV or read the text of the speech.
See a similar analysis of Obama's speech and of Palin's speech.