Jonesrooy: collect all three!

Nov 05

I’m doing an experiment. If you have Twitter, would you please RT this tweet? https://twitter.com/robdelaney/status/265641093616504832

Using My Wordle Powers For Good

This is a post about the election, because there are not many of those on the Internet right now.

The post presents some word clouds, or “wordles”, I made of President Obama and Gov. Romney’s respective Democratic and Republican National Convention Speeches. I chose these speeches because they are remarks made by each candidate to his constituents (while they may not be the only target audiences, they may be among the most important). What does each person say to his own “team”?

I created the graphics with the easy-to-use site wordle.net. I downloaded transcripts of each candidate’s speech from NPR.org (Obama and Romney). The wordle for Mr. Romney represents a completely unedited transcript. For Mr. Obama, I deleted all instances of audience participation (e.g., chants of “USA USA USA” and “FOUR MORE YEARS”. What are we, animals?! Just kidding, I totally would have chanted). I also deleted many of Obama’s opening “thank you, thank you”s. I did not have to do this for Romney because his transcript did not contain any of these things. I don’t know whether this is because there was no audience participation or if NPR just didn’t include them.

I originally created the wordles in red and blue, but for comparability, I present them below in the same color scheme. (The scheme is called “Milk Paint”, and I think we can all agree that sounds disgusting.)

The figures below represent the words used by each candidate in his speech. Note: the word clouds do not contain common English words like “of”, “and”, or “the”. (The removal of these words is a function I chose in Wordle; I do not know exactly what their list of frequent words is, but my impression is that linguists are largely agreed on the majority of words in this group.)

The larger the word, the more frequently it was used. Color and orientation do not matter (that’s a forward-sounding sentence if I’ve ever heard one!).

Figure 1: President Obama’s DNC Speech (total length: 39:03)

Obama's Commonly Used Words in his 2012 DNC Speech

Figure 2: Governor Romney’s RNC Speech (37:41)

A Few Unscientific Observations

Reassuringly, both Obama and Romney seem aware that they are running for office in AMERICA. Romney seems especially aware that he thus needs the votes of AMERICANS and that he is running for PRESIDENT.

Applying the “ocular method” (that is “looking at”), it appears Obama uses more and more different words than Romney. What does this mean?

There are simply more words in Obama’s wordle than Romney’s. A count of all the words in the full transcript (I did it in AntConc, a content analysis program, but you can do it in regular old Microsoft Word) reveals Obama used 4601 words, while Romney used 4094 (a difference of 507 words, or about 2 double-spaced pages of a college essay).

Each speech comes to about 10 pages in a Word document, suggesting Romney delivered more shorter paragraphs than Obama. (A glance through the text supports this: it appears Romney did deliver many one-liners.)

Obama uses a greater variety of words than Romney. A wordlist (a list of words used in a text along with their corresponding frequency — also generated in AntConc) for each speech finds that Obama used 1200 different words compared to Romney’s 1063. This includes frequently used words like “and” and “the”.

Among Romney’s most commonly used “meaningful” words (i.e., not conjunctions or other minor parts of speech) are “America” (57), “president” (34), “Americans” (21), and “business” (15).

Among Obama’s top meaningful words are “America” (17), “jobs” (17), “future” (16), and “believe” (13).

Obama’s top words have much lower frequency than Romney’s. This is because he uses many more words that are “in-between minor and major”. E.g., he uses words like “you” (78), “our” (58), and “because” (22) quite a bit. (Romney’s use of those words is “you” (48), “our” (48), and “because” (13).) I do not know whether a greater use of connector words like “because” corresponds to higher linguistic complexity, but I would guess it does.

Obama says “Romney” ONE TIME, while Romney says “Obama” THIRTEEN TIMES.

Let’s have some fun with collocates! These are words that frequently appear alongside a target word. I looked at “women”. Obama says “women” 3 times. Looking at words two to the right (2R) and two to the left (2L) of “women” in Obama’s speech reveals: “men” (2), “choices” (1), “Christian” (1), and “belong” (1). Romney says “women” 4 times. Collocates include “why” (1), “should” (1), “officials” (1), and “Obamacare” (1).

In the spirit of completeness, below I present a wordle for Vice President Biden’s remarks to the DNC. Also, I am hilarious.

Aug 13

mattfisher:

My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court

I’ve been sending out some impertinent tweets about Progressive Insurance lately, but I haven’t explained how they pissed me off. So I will do that here as succinctly as possible. There’s a general understanding that says, “insurance companies— oh they’re awful,” but since Progressive turned their shit hose on my late sister and my parents, I’ve learned some things that really surprised me.

I’ll try to cleave to the facts. On June 19, 2010, my sister was driving in Baltimore when her car was struck by another car and she was killed. The other driver had run a red light and hit my sister as she crossed the intersection on the green light.

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