Roll your own tag clouds

Building on Jim’s post on tag clouds, this certainly is a great way to analyze a document. And here’s a tool that could allow us to, as Daniel points out in his comment, analyze the zeitgeist of an entire administration. Check out TagCrowd. Paste in some text (or upload a text file of up to 100KB), press a button, and you can instantly visualize word frequency! I tried it with the transcript for President Bush’s remarks at the signing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (aka the US torture bill or the death of Habeas Corpus) and here’s the tag cloud I got. Interestingly, the most common tags wrote the following sentence:

“American attacks bill; CIA commissions intelligence military program questioning terrorists war.” (punctuation added!)

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