Saturday, May 15, 2010

Word Clouds and Congress

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text you provide.  I’m sure most have seen examples, I know I have but until recently, did not know how to create the cool graphics and did not even know it had a name. 

Here I found an interesting thing to do with Wordle.   The Pew Research Center asked people to respond to the question;  Describe Congress in one word.  The resulting word cloud was interesting to say the least.  The larger the word in the cloud the greater the percentage of response. Only 4% responded with something positive.  (likely family members and staffers IMO) Larger words were Dysfunctional and Corrupt.  Go figure.  Anyway give it a look here http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=982

Just for grins I put together an example for Sidewinder's view.  Note I have a high opinion of myself LOL. Neat stuff nontheless.


This is about the general feeling I get percentage wise among folks I communicate with. If this in anyway represents the true feeling of the American public how the hell is it they keep on holding their positions?  Could it be we simply have no other choice?  Is it that the voting system we have in place has been figured out to insure desired outcome by those in the know?  How can fewer than 500 people have so much power over 300 million.  Is this the way the Republic was intended to function?  Why do I have this sinking feeling that something's just not right?

No comments:

Post a Comment