archive.Joe Lamantia.com

A meme is emerging for the use text clouds as visualization for – and a source of insight into – political speeches and speakers.
Text clouds of the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate appear front and center on the DNC blog democrats.org, in Tag Clouds Can Tell Us a Lot…. (sourced from media analysis firm Upstream Analysis via Pollster.com).


As you can see in the quote from the writeup below, we’re quickly developing sophisticated readings of the (comparatively) simple visualization methods used to generate text clouds.

But sometimes a cloud also reflects concerns that voters share about a candidate. This is because the candidate gets asked about the issue–a lot–and then has to talk about it.

Check out the large “Pro-Life” tag in flip-flopping Romney’s cloud, or the large “Think” tag in Giuliani’s cloud–the candidate notorious for leaping first and thinking later.

Political interpretations aside, this is a nuanced reading of the resulting clouds: it recognizes the dynamic feedback link between intentions and responses that becomes visible in the rendered clouds. For a visualization geek, these clouds show the differing agendas of candidates and audience as they played out, a nice example of social mechanisms in action.

Note to the tool builders of the world

How about putting together a visualization toolset that shows evolving text clouds as the debate progresses? I’m imagining a timeline plus transcript plus cloud view of the accumulating text cloud for each candidate, with options for moving forward or back in the stream of words.

What could be better than watching words and ideas bloom over time, the same way we see flowers in a garden blossom, open, and close in time lapse photography. I’d like to think we can grow something poetic and beautiful, as well as useful, from the (sadly debased) soil of politicized sound bites surrounding us.

Or, with a nod to the brutal competition built into most natural systems, you may choose to watch the struggle of waterlillies for sunlight, in this clip from The Amazing Life of Plants.