Crooked! Donald Trump’s most recent insults as a word cloud

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.

NYtimesThis 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?

Most commonly used words in Trump insults, by frequency.

Most commonly used words in Trump insults, by frequency. By Nicole Martinelli, via Wordle.

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?

President Obama’s 2013 inauguration speech as a word cloud

Obama 2013 inauguration word cloud

Yeah, I know. Word clouds don’t tell the whole story, or even an accurate story. But I had a fun few minutes playing with Word it Out and President Obama’s inauguration speech.

The program lets you add up to 728 words and then cherry pick what words to include, weight them by count and choose how to order them. It automagically discards articles and punctuation, too, and lets you edit either list of included and excluded words.

I used about 350 and as incomplete as it is, you still get a flavor of the speech – from the words “gay” “fight” “diversity” at the far left edge to “principles” “values” “enduring peace” top center and “faction and “fascism” in the far right bottom corner.

You can check out the full transcript of his 2013 inauguration – which included mentions of Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall – here.

And for an amazing take on frequently used words in US presidential inauguration speeches, check out Santiago Ortiz’s stunning work.