{"id":701,"date":"2010-04-23T20:55:16","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T20:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=701"},"modified":"2010-04-21T21:05:01","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T21:05:01","slug":"election-word-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/23\/election-word-clouds\/","title":{"rendered":"Election word clouds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It may have escaped your attention, but there\u2019s an <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/election_2010\/default.stm\">election<\/a> coming up in the next couple of weeks. Amongst other things, this means that the Great British Public is subjected to endless coverage of politicians. There\u2019s probably not much we like less.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a different way of distilling and taking in all those speeches, remarks and comments though: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tag_cloud\">word clouds<\/a>. Why read whole policies when you can reduce the party manifestos down to a few key buzz words?<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.ie\/world-news\/europe\/word-clouds-offer-insight-into-buzz-phrases-of-political-parties-2138506.html\">word clouds<\/a>, phrases differ in size depending on their usage. So \u2018people\u2019 figures prominently across all three parties, \u2018new\u2019 is big in Labour\u2019s cloud, nearly matched by the Conservatives \u2018government\u2019 and overshadowed by the Liberal Democrat&#8217;s &#8216;liberal&#8217;. <\/p>\n<p>The word clouds were created on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wordle.net\/\">wordle.net<\/a> and can be seen <a href=\"http:\/\/news.uk.msn.com\/politics\/general-election-2010\/analysis\/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=153110649\">here<\/a> and below. I wonder if there\u2019s any way to use word clouds for language learning? <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/Labour-word-cloud-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Labour word cloud\" title=\"Labour word cloud\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-704\" \/>  <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/Liberal-Democrat-word-cloud-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Liberal Democrat word cloud\" title=\"Liberal Democrat word cloud\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-705\" \/>  <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/Conservative-word-cloud-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Conservative word cloud\" title=\"Conservative word cloud\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-706\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It may have escaped your attention, but there\u2019s an election coming up in the next couple of weeks. Amongst other things, this means that the Great British Public is subjected to endless coverage of politicians. There\u2019s probably not much we like less. There\u2019s a different way of distilling and taking in all those speeches, remarks [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,44],"tags":[691,123,692,690,689,44],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-words","tag-election","tag-language-learning","tag-speeches","tag-word-clouds","tag-wordle","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":708,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions\/708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}