Tag Clouds applied to GPO/FDLP
Building on James R's post, I ran two major GPO/Council documents through Tag Crowd:
- “Knowledge Will Forever Governâ€: A VISION STATEMENT FOR FEDERAL DEPOSITORY LIBRARIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY - Published by the Depository Library Council
- A Strategic Vision for the 21st Century - published by GPO management.
Kudos to GPO: Fall 2006 DLC Proceedings Now Available
Barely a week after the close of the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council meeting, I see that GPO has posted mostly complete proceedings. Good work GPO! This is the level of service the community expects in the information age. Thanks for giving it to us. Have some feedback or thoughts about the recently completed Council meeting? Join us at our Fall 2006 Roundup page and comment! Or drop us an e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo.info and let us know whether we can post your comment. Continue reading
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!)
remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud by Chirag Mehta, 2 Nov. 2006. An interesting remix of public documents! Mehta got more than 360 speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 and created a "tag cloud" much like you see on del.icio.us (and like our own del.icio.us tag cloud in the left-hand side-bar of this page). On Mehta's site, larger font size indicates more use of the word and different colors indicate newer and older use. There is a slider-control at the top of the page that allows you to view the clouds for each document. As we often mention, such re-use of public information should be an explicit goal of government information policy. Interestingly, Mehta got the documents from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com, not from government sources directly. Continue reading
Please comment on Digital Distribution by 11/15!
I wanted to remind people that we will be sending any "digital distribution" input we collect to the Depository Library Council and appropriate GPO staff after November 15, 2006. Please check out the audio and text summaries of the digital distribution session available on our Fall 2006 DLC meeting page, then check out our responses to GPO's discussion questions. Then let us know what you think either by commenting on the response page or by e-mailing us at admin AT freegovinfo.info if you're really shy. All responses will be forwarded to GPO whether or not we agree with you. That's what community discussion is all about. Continue reading