Tuesday, October 28, 2008

They Said What? A Look at Election-Speak

I am fascinated by how technology allows us to analyze text. Besides some of the snappy tricks I have learned in using Word (where was auto-summarize when I was in graduate school?), tools like Wordle allow us to create visual representations of text in order to analyze word choice. One of the most fascinating things I have done with Wordle is to take the text of a presidential candidates speech during the primaries and put it into Wordle while working with social studies teachers.

I have officially been "one upped" by the creators at this site who have done a full scale lexical analysis of the presidential and vice-presidential debates this year. In addition to a sometimes mind-numbing analysis of the words that are used by each candidate, the following image was also shared:



I am not a huge fan of Venn diagrams in writing but I thought this was a very interesting image to share with students (please visit the site- there are many, many more!) and to have them think about what this analysis might mean in the context of persuasive speech.

1 comment:

kkondrick said...

As soon as your post popped up on my reader igoogle homepage, I used Wordle. How cool. I pasted one of my blogs, and was inspired by the visual representation to write a poem on writing (the subject of my blog). Very cool. The hot topic in my class lately has been on the presidential speeches, so the second site was an interesting find as well.