Word clouds

Today's souvenir issue of the Guardian is interesting for more than the obvious reason (11 pages of Obama ephemera, what more could you want?): it's the first time I'm aware of that word clouds have been used in the paper.

Word clouds are increasingly common on the web; basically, they count the number of times each word is used in a given text, then map out the data into a nice little graphic - the bigger and darker the word, the more times it appears.

The Guardian have applied this to Obama's inaugural address, and to those of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt and George Bush. The results are interesting - Obama's most used words are nation, new, must, every, people, less, today and America. It's not hard to recognise that Obama's message is one of renewal, of starting over (change, the major drive of his campaign, doesn't feature, perhaps reflecting the reality he faces now he's in office). Peace and liberty come much further down the list.

Comparisons with former presidents are also interesting - Lincoln's key words were war, God and Union (it was delivered before the end of the civil war in 1865), whereas Roosevelt, speaking at the peak of the New Deal era, focused on government, democracy, people and progress. Perhaps surprisingly, Bush is the one who spoke of freedom and liberty (one flaw of word clouds is that there's no context - in this case, Bush used American freedom to stand for waging war abroad).

So far, so good, but the Guardian's graphic has one major drawback. Word clouds really come into their own when they are interactive, when each word is clickable so you can access the full body of data behind the image. This isn't possible on the printed page, so the full functionality of the graphic is lost.

You can read about word clouds at Wikipedia, watch an instructional video on YouTube or make your own courtesy of Wordle (the one above is a cloud of this blog).