Petraeus ‘07 vs. Petraeus ‘08.
Here’s a word cloud I cooked up real quick over at Many Eyes comparing today’s opening statement from Iraq commander General David Petraeus to his previous Congressional visit last September. As Dana Milbank has noted, you’ll find less focus on Al Qaeda this time around, and more mentions for Iran.
Note that this isn’t his entire testimony. Just the opening statements. So, it doesn’t include the many questions he’s fielded.
congress, data, data visualization, Iran, iraq, iraq war, many eyes, military, petraeus, politics, quantitative analysis, script, testimony, word cloud
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T Miller wrote:
Ben:This is a very cool tool for a political journalist. Reporters are always trying to parse the SOU or campaign speeches to compare one to the next. But it’s ultimately a difficult exercise. You might be able to search for a few word terms to compare — say “Iraq” or “immigrant” — but you can’t compare all the words in every speech. There’s simply not time.My point is, this should be part of the toolkit of any reporter tracking a political figure’s attempts to maneuver around an issue.
Posted on 10-Apr-08 at 5:05 pm | Permalink
palewire wrote:
If there was an online data viz arms race, my guess is that the tag cloud would be winning the war. They’re all over the place.
I suspect there are two reasons for that.
One is that the data acquisition is very simple. All you need is a big blob of text and you’re good to go. That’s a lot easier than assembling data for a proper bivariate analysis.
Two is that even if the diagram you produce isn’t all that revelatory, it still looks somewhat interesting. At least enough to convince us it merits publication. I think that’s at least partially because the form is still somewhat novel. We’ve all see a line chart a million times, so it probably has to be telling us something pretty dramatic before we get too excited about it.
They’re not very pretty, but we’ve worked a couple quick ones into the LAT lately. Here’s Bush’s SOTUs, Arnold’s SOTS’s, and this cycle’s Democratic and Republican debates. So, for whatever it’s worth, we had some fun with it. But, as far as counting words goes, the most fun I’ve had this year is chasing Reagan with Andy Malcolm
Posted on 10-Apr-08 at 5:42 pm | Permalink
palewire wrote:
Oh, and if you’ve never seen it, here is my favorite SOTU parsing tool.
Posted on 10-Apr-08 at 5:48 pm | Permalink