Sunday, August 26, 2012

Viz: examining Wake county school superintendent Tata’s State of the Schools Speech with word clouds

Tata’s State of the Schools Speech, Visualized

If you thought school politics was difficult to understand before, check out this word cloud we created from the superintendent’s State of the Schools speech.

Tata’s speech Thursday focused mostly on school performance, as you can see with the prominence of the word “schools” in the word cloud. He also addressed the need for a school construction bond next year and stressed that new standardized tests, called the Common Core, might hit Wake with a reality check.

Combined Speech Many Eyes

Nerd note: We made the clouds using Many Eyes, by inputting the entire text of Tata’s speech. We then eliminated for redundancies like “schools” and “school.” We also eliminated words that didn’t seem to have much meaning like “get” and “year.”