Your RNC / DNC Convention Reduced to a Word Cloud

frets — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:51:02 +0000

Now that the Democratic and Republican National Conventions are over, I grabbed all of the (available) speech texts from the DNC and RNC Web sites and threw them into wordle.net just for fun (yep, I’m sadistic that way sometimes). It is hard to compare word occurrences because the Republicans don’t have nearly as many speeches available (52) as the Democrats (168). The Reps lost a day to Gustav, but they also seem to only have the major speeches available online, whereas the Dems have everything available.

Some interesting findings in the data (hover for definitions):

The Obama-to-McCain ratio (DNC): 2.9:1
The McCain-to-Obama ratio (RNC): 8:1
The Obama-to-Bush ratio (DNC): 4.9:1
The McCain-to-Bush ratio (RNC): 88:1 Bush was only mentioned 4 times in speeches available at the RNC.
The Obama-to-Biden ratio (DNC): 9.9:1
The McCain-to-Palin ratio (RNC): 8:1

Here are the word clouds:

All DNC 2008 speeches word cloud

All RNC 2008 speeches word cloud

Here’s the top 15 words:

	DNC Top 15	RNC Top 15
1	barack	john
2	obama	mccain
3	america	country
4	change	america
5	need	people
6	years	american
7	american	know
8	people	can
9	can	need
10	country	world
11	president	president
12	mccain	americans
13	john	government
14	new	want
15	work	like

Here are links to the word clouds at wordle.net:

And if you haven’t had enough, I’ve linked both the DNC speech word counts and RNC speech word counts as text (csv) files. Enjoy!

Box of Data » word clouds

Your RNC / DNC Convention Reduced to a Word Cloud