With the General Election campaign in full swing, I decided that I ought to read the parties’ manifestos. And I’ve got to be honest with you: they’re pretty heavy-going.
In this article, I have attempted to summarise the parties’ manifestos somewhat more succinctly: as word-clouds. You’re probably familiar with the concept, but if you’re not, then the larger the word, the more frequently it occurs in the passage of text.
These clouds were generated with the free tool at wordle.net. Just for the record, I’m not trying to make any political point here. Also, I make no guarantees as to the reliability of the method I used to create these clouds, so I can’t guarantee that they’re a totally accurate representation of the parties’ manifestos. But hopefully you will find them interesting and fun.
Conservative
Labour
Liberal Democrat
Tags: 2010, conservative, election, general election, labour, lib dem, liberal democrat, manifesto, Politics, word cloud
I will be honest and say that the reason I checked out your blog was your tweets today.
I therefore wanted to see what kind of person you were and what interested you, my basic nosiness at work:-) So, what I found when I did a bit of roaming was the word cloud and I just think it is a class bit of work….
One thing for me to ponder – isn’t it interesting that the Labour cloud doesn’t contain the word ‘labour’? Were they so ashamed that they didn’t want to use ‘that word’? Also, Labour were also quite spare in their use of another power word, ‘government’. It is writ large in the Conservative cloud and quite large for the Liberal Democrats.
One last search of the page found that the word ‘spend’ is not used at all, quite telling I think.
I am sure that some statistician could take this information and make something of it, although I am also fairly sure that they could take a random word generator and do the same. However, I do think that being ashamed to use the name of your party in your manifesto is a negative any way you look at it.