Tag Clouds, Election-Style

October 9th, 2008, 11 Comments »


I’m a big fan of Wordle. Everybody likes pretty tag clouds, but until recently, I’ve had no practical use for the tool.

What with the forthcoming election and all, and being in marketing, I thought it might be interesting to use Wordle to distill each of the four national parties’ websites into a tag cloud. The cloud would reflect the terms that the party uses most frequently on their English-language websites. With an assist from Ask Metafilter, I got them done. I’ll explain a little more about how after the clouds.

As usual, click for larger versions:

What Conclusions Can We Draw?

That’s more a question for you than me, as I haven’t spent much time trying to grok what these clouds tell us (yes, I used ‘grok’). What jumps out at you?

How Did We Make Them?

First, I grabbed a complete copy of each party’s website. I just stuck with HTML files, so if a party hosts a lot of PDFs with unique content, then that’s not reflected. The sites, of course, ended up being different sizes, and I’m relying on my site-copying software, so I can’t be certain I got all the pages.

Then we concatenated each set of HTML files into one gigantic file. Using some scripty-magic, we generated the top 100 or 250 words, each appearing as many times as they appear in the original site.

I went through each of these to clean out most or all of the leftover HTML code, navigational terms like ‘email’ or ‘newsletter’ and French words. The French is why we used 250 words in some cases. For some sites, I downloaded both the French and English version of the site, so I needed to remove the French. By working with a 250 word file, I was able to clean out the French and still have a sizable database of words.

In short, it’s somewhat unscientific, but I’m optimistic that the clouds represent a reasonably fair reflection of each site’s top content. If anyone wants to work with the content I copied, I’m happy to share it. I’m not going to publish the complete sites here, though, as I expect that would constitute a copyright violation.

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How Much Does Your Local Candidate Matter When You Vote?

October 4th, 2008, 8 Comments »

I voted today. Unfortunately, I’m going to be in the US on October 14. I voted for the Green Party, as I have done so in the last two (maybe three?) elections. For pretty much the same reasons. I have no expectation that my candidate will win, but I believe in supporting the party whose values most closely align with my own.

I’m not a big fan of strategic voting. Even if I was, I’m pretty sure that the Conservative candidate in Victoria has about as much chance as winning as, say, the Christian Heritage candidate. Er, that’s not technically accurate, but Victoria hasn’t elected a Tory since 1988. Besides, VoteForEnvironment suggests that I can take my pick.

Party or Person?

When voting, how much consideration do you give to your local candidate and how much do you give to the national party? I’ve asked this question before, and some thoughtful discussion resulted. Four years later, I can’t think of a good reason not to ask it again.

As I indicated, my choice skews heavily toward the party. Why?

  • I care more about national policy than local issues. I’m totally ambivalent about how my MP represents Victoria in Ottawa.
  • It’s kind of by default. I lived in Vancouver for many years. Can I describe even one of Hedy Fry’s accomplishments as my MP? Can you? I’m no political news junkie, but I think I’ve been as informed and well-read as the average Vancouverite over the past decade. It’s much easier for me to identify with a national party that holds particular values and positions, as opposed to my local MP whose accomplishments and goals I can’t imagine.

My perception of the party leader–of their competency and character–matters as well. Less than the party, but more than the local candidate.

How about you? Do you vote for the candidate or the party?

UPDATE: On a vaguely-related note, somebody sent me this video featuring local Vancouver candidates talking about their parties’ platforms on climate change.

UPDATE #2: Speaking of videos, I love the aesthetics of this one (thought its message could be clearer).

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