Monday, November 13, 2006

With most of the elections behind us...

I would like to start bringing out some of the more interesting things I find while searching on the Internet.

In my previous job I was a metadata librarian. I am fascinated by how people are changing the way we obtain information. Tags are used to describe any item or topic on a page, in a document, etc. Tags are an informal, non-standardized vocabulary used to aid others in locating materials. In the library we use things like thesauri and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. These terms can be difficult to remember and hard to understand. Tags and tagging is used to in such sites like del.icio.us to help people locate information using common language.


Regardless what your political beliefs are, this is an interesting use of a tagging phenomenon. The following link goes to a web page that shows what words are prominent in each president’s time. The page shows the top 100 words for particular speeches by out presidents.

Here are some keys before you start playing (by all means take some time and play). The larger the text, the more often the word was used. The brighter the word is the more likely you will hear it in everyday conversation.

It was developed by Chirag Mehta, 2 Nov. 2006. The tag cloud official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 AD.
The dataset consists of over 360 documents downloaded from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com.


Enjoy.

U.S Presidential Speeches Aging Tag Cloud Timeline.

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