UPDATE: The Times is still tracking the list of insults — as of January 2017 it grew to 305 — and added a visualization that shows the kinds of people and things most frequently insulted. (Spoiler alert: journalists and Democrats.)
The reporters at the New York Times combed through Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s Twitter feed for the most recent 250 insults to nations, people and random things – including a podium.
This is the kind of story that cries out for a visual representation – there has to be a better way to process the information than listing names of the people he insulted in alphabetical order and the tweets as quotes underneath them. What story does that tell?
A quick word cloud will tell you that the most common insult for the straight-talking New Yorker is “crooked” (his go-to insult for rival Hillary Clinton) followed by “dishonest,” “bad,” and “failing.”
A couple of necessary caveats: this cloud was made with a tool called Wordle and the size of the word corresponds to the number of times it appears in the text. The text in the graphic was copied and pasted from the article on the NYT site without any additional weighting or manipulation. The program automatically cuts out common words (i.e. articles) but it would be interesting to see how the cloud shifts by cutting some filler words like “new” “news” “many” “another” etc.
Digital publishing gives public figures so many ways to broadcast a message – it’s our job as journalists to make sense of it. What would you trawl through other political figures tweets to understand?