What people were saying about Ed Stelmach and Kevin Taft in the the last election
What people wrote in Blogs about Kevin Taft and Ed Stelmach during the campaign for the last provincial election? If you wanted to read every single post, you would be on for several sleepless nights. However, by using some Web 2.0 visual representations, in a short amount of time, you could have a broad picture of what was written. The visual representations we used were tag clouds. Tag clouds are generally used to represent tags associated with the content of websites. Nevertheless, you can use tag clouds for many other applications. One of them is to summarize written essays. See for instance the tag cloud below that was made based on Tim O’Reilly’s essay: What is Web 2.0.
The key feature of tag clouds is that the importance of a tag (or word) is shown with font size. The larger the font size, the larger the number of appearances of the word.
Coming back to what people were saying about Ed Stelmach and Kevin Taft, here are two tag clouds. The first one is the tag cloud for what people were writing about Ed Stelmach.
People that wrote post related to Stelmach made emphasis, among other things, on Alberta and Albertans, Vote and election, good and government, and change and Tomorrow. Note that while there were lots of mentions to JOBS there were not many mentions to economy and oil. From the largest Alberta’s cities only Calgary and Edmonton appeared consistently in Blog posts associated with Ed Stelmach. And interestingly, environment is no where to be seen.
Here is the tag cloud associated with blog posts related to Kevin Taft
People that wrote post related to Taft made emphasis, among other things, on ALBERTA and DEBATE, VOTE and election, issues and government, and change and Yesterday. There were many mentions to economy, energy and oil. The four larger Alberta’s cities had some mentions: Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer and Lethbridge. Interestingly, while environment and environmental issues were discussed constantly by people writing posts related to Kevin Taft, the phrase it’s time did not gain much traction.
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