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Wordle – Beautiful word clouds

September 11, 2008 on 8:59 am by Thomas | In Politics, Tools | Say something!

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like..”

I discovered Wordle in a Twitter-tweet by Steve Rubel where he compared Obama’s and McCain’s acceptance speeches with the help of this text analysis tool. It’s very open to interpretation indeed but somehow pretty and illustrative.

I compared two speeches of Müntefering and Merkel, the one Müntefering held at the Parteitag in Hamburg and one Merkel held to celebrate the Soziale Marktwirtschaft. They were surprisingly similar. A very interesting fact is that both use the word “müssen” a lot. Maybe German politicians should think about putting their messages into sentences with more “können”.

You can see Müntefering’s speech on the left side (obviously, Merkel wouldn’t say “Genossen”) and Merkel’s on the right side.