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Charles Landau
Charles Landau

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Visualizing the Primary Debates

The past couple days in the US, the Democrats have been debating about who should get to run against Trump. The transcripts seemed like a fun subject for dataviz.

All the code for these visualizations are posted here in various commits.

Firstly I thought it would be helpful to get a simple bar showing how much the candidates spoke.

Note: as you'll see, I didn't take time to ensure a perfect cleanse of the data. There are some artifacts and errors, which will be obvious in the word clouds.

dems_word_count

I was also surprised to find that if you create a TF-IDF based distance matrix...

dems_distance_matrix_viz

... The speakers sort themselves out nicely. The lowest-polling person I've seen described as T1 is Mayor Pete, and the pattern holds whether or not you count him as T1.

Does this mean anything? I don't think so, at least not all on its own.

Finally here are some word clouds:

dems_word_clouds

Overall I think this was a fun little exercise, but I don't suspect that it says too much about the race.

Let me know what you think! Especially if you notice a mistake.

Top comments (6)

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thaothanhluu profile image
Thao Thanh Luu

The word clouds are really difficult to read due to the colors but regardless this is great!

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Charles Landau

Thanks for the feedback! I also did a light-themed version but in my quick testing I felt that it looked worse. You can check it out below:

light_themed_wc

Let me know if you think that's better

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Kevin K. Johnson

Probably easier to read, but both versions have contrast issues. The purples on the dark background, the yellows on the light background.

Additionally, word clouds are a bit difficult to read generally.

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charlesdlandau profile image
Charles Landau

Yea I agree with that. The Python wordclouds package does the best it can.

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David J Eddy

Any chance we could get links to large format images? They look interesting but are small (when I click on them). I esp. like the word cloud concept.

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charlesdlandau profile image
Charles Landau

Thanks! The source images are in the kaggle link I shared at the top.

kaggle.com/charleslandau/democrati...