A picture speaks a thousand words
Via Virtual Economics, I found this neat little visualization tool from Neoformix.
“Introducing News Spectrum ! It is a visualization of the words used for two topics in the latest results from Google News. One topic is coloured blue, the other red, and the associated words are coloured and positioned based on how highly they are associated with the two topics. Click on any word to see the related Google News results.” - Neoformix
So, Jeff Clark at Neoformix suggested using it to find the associations between two news topics, Seamus McCauley inventively tried two news sources. I thought I would try two people who are in the news:
Hmmm. Interesting. You can see that the word “Leader” is one of the biggest words so it is the one most associated with Clegg and Cameron, but it is also way over to the right, suggesting that the word is associated with Nick oh so much more than Cameron. Not surprising, Cameron is not so much a leader, as the person at the front of a baying mob. Also “Brown” is a high-rated word but skewed more towards Cameron, perhaps suggesting that Cameron is referenced in relation to Brown rather than a person in his own right. Sounds about right.
As you would expect the words “Liberal” and “Democrat” are nicely in Clegg’s half as if the algorithm knows that Cameron’s liberalism is a sham. Also nice to see “Crewe” and “Nantwich” in the Lib Dem half. Although surprisingly “Nuneaton” isn’t in Cameron’s bit. “Burma” is associated with Nick while “Myanmar” is associated with Dave - so we are on the side of democracy and the people, while Dave sucks up to the military junta.
My favourite though is tucked away in the top-right corner on Nick’s side - “Samantha”.
Hmmm, time to get worried Dave when even you wife is associated more with the opposition.
Could she be one of the 30?
Hehehe. What a fabulous tool. Just tried “liberal” and “conservative” and most of the results were US words (Obama dead centre, McCain towards liberal - eh??) but Clegg was there, one of the closest to liberal. Cameron nowhere to be seen…
Elizabeth Shenton and Edward Timpson shows a tidewash of words in his direction and a worrying amount of blank space on the Shenton side. But it did show me a new way to use the tool - reading down the column of words right next to the search term, which for Timpson gives this:
card proud lies nasty racist conservative heir mps barrister bbc hats hat shows son chain fresh boy gives talk prime visit tails against fix public posh playing
Alix’s last blog post..And I was doing so well…