Who said what, and how often
Wei-Hwa Huang has put together a few histograms showing the frequency of various words and phrases as used by the major players in the first debate. I’m not convinced that these graphs can be used for scientific analysis anymore then tea-leaves can, but it still provides some mild entertainment and head sctraching. Notable things to look for: “poland”, “at the wrong place”, “at the wrong time”, “made a mistake”, “United States”, “United Nations” and “respect”
October 3rd, 2004 at 3:38 pm
Bush talked about “hard work” or how “hard” it is to get the job done a total of 13 times by one of those graphs :P
Maybe he should resign from the Presidency if it’s so hard. You know, somebody else would probably do a better job.
October 5th, 2004 at 5:10 pm
If you have access to a UNIX shell and a text copy of the transcript, you can do a single-word analysis yourself.
> cat transcript.txt | tr ‘ ‘ ‘\n’ | sort | uniq -c | sort > output.txt
I did my own debate analysis, based on themes…
in color :)