January 20th, 2009

Obama’s speech . . . graphically

Here’s Obama’s speech today as a Wordle ”word cloud,” which give greater prominence to words that appear frequently in a text.

 

Category: Design, Politics | Tags:

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3 Comments

1. Dana Ly on January 20, 2009

   Dana,

   In Obama’s campaigning, he used very inclusive words often, such as “we”, instead of “I”. That’s part of the reason, as I have read, that his message of hope and service resonated with so many people. And with your graph, I can vividly see that he continued to do so, using words like “common”, “every”, and “people”. Today is not just an American day, but a day for every citizen of the world.

   Dan, I know you have a penchant for numbers, and you’ve illustrated it in a very interesting and creative fashion – very right-brain. Would you share with your readers other websites that similarly crunch-numbers?

2. Ed Brenegar on January 21, 2009

   The word that stands out to me in this list is “must.” It is a word like act or choose. An imperative to do something. I call to activism, not passivity. I wish him well.

3. Chris Reckling on January 23, 2009

   @Dana – Another researcher at IBM (where wordle came from) built a tool called Many Eyes, that lets you visualize data in interesting ways and allow others to comment and extend it.
   http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/

   (Many Eyes is also part of a product LotusLive, but that’s a different story.)

   Chris