BlackNotBlack.com

Politics Can Be Beautiful

I stumbled upon a wonderful website called Wordle that analyzes any text of your choice and rearranges it into visually pleasing graphic clouds. The java-based tool gives prominence to the most utilized words, and offers various menus for editing the final output. One of my favorite websites, Guardian UK, used the application on John McCain's official blog and discovered that the most utilized word was "Obama." Then they used it on Obama's blog and found that the most utilized word was also "Obama." Draw whatever conclusions you wish.

I used Wordle on my last two political posts and discovered that their contents aren't so awful to consider after all. In fact, I get an almost peaceful feeling from contemplating these two lovely clouds. The cloud below looks like the work of a Bronx graffiti tagger whose favorite paint store ran out of primary colors. Using Wordle magic to transform politics into soothing pastel babel has proven to me that there's truly beauty in everything if you are desperate enough to look for it. Maybe Cindy McCain possesses a sort of mental Wordle that fires in the blink of a synapse whenever she gazes at her scabby old troglodyte of a husband.

There's another intriguing website that functions very much like Wordle, using the speeches of American presidents to build what the site calls "tag clouds." By using a slider to go backward and forward in time, users see that the emphasis in speeches has changed over the last century. In just a few minutes of playing with this amazing little zeitgeist meter, I noticed that the word "constitution" was frequently utilized in presidential speeches for over a hundred years, sometimes even appearing as the most utilized word. But in speeches from the last decade "constitution" has pulled a Houdini and all but disappeared. Gee, I wonder what that means?

Labels: barack obama, Guardian, John McCain, Wordle

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 11:26 AM