With all of Canada’s major political parties releasing platforms in anticipation of the upcoming federal election, there can be a lot to read through and process, to the point where most people probably don’t even read their preferred party’s platform all the way through, let alone all of them (I know I usually don’t). With that in mind, this post isn’t so much a skeptical look at the platforms as it is trying to find an interesting and easy-to-digest way of presenting the information contained within them. So, without further comment, I present my next post in an ongoing series looking at the platforms of Canada’s political parties for the 2011 federal election.
(Click on the images to embiggen.)
Conservative Party of Canada
Liberal Party of Canada
Bloc Québécois
New Democratic Party of Canada
Green Party of Canada
These graphics were generated using a free online tool called Wordle. I grabbed PDFs of each of the party’s official platforms from their websites, converted them to text files, and then used that text to generate the images using Wordle’s proprietary algorithms, which essentially just puts the words together in an aesthetically pleasing way, weighting the size of the words based on their frequency in the source text.
It should also be mentioned that it was discussed leaving out some of the more common platform words, like “Canada/Canadian”, “government”, and the party names. Ultimately, I decided to leave these in, as I found it was interesting to see the emphasis that each party placed on these words, as well as the name of their own (and other) party and politicians.
We’re still three weeks away from the election; keep on the lookout for more in the near future.
This was a neat idea! I can’t help but notice how prominently “Stephen” stands out in the CPC cloud. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
Also curious is the way “Stephen” and “Harper” stand out in the Bloc Québécois cloud.
It’s not just the Block – “Harper” is fairly prominent in the Liberal cloud, too. This seems to suggest that the Bloc and the Liberals are busy slagging harper, while the NDP and the Green Party are focusing on their issues. Of course, the conservative cloud does also feature the ‘word’ “Ignatieff-Led”, so it’s not one sided.
As for the prominence of Harpers name in the conservative cloud … also notable is the complete absence of the word “Conservative”. Every other party has their name prominently featured. This suggests that the Conservatives have replaced all references to their party with references to Harper. Seems a little strange … maybe I’ll actually read their platform and try to figure out what’s going on
I’m really surprised by how unusual the NDP’s block of text is… not going on about regionalism, or power, or personalities…
The Liberal one looks just as bad as the Conservative… maybe even a bit worse.
Good thing I don’t make my decisions based on fancy grap… ooo… shiny…
Here’s who to vote for:
http://drjimsthinkingshop.com/2011/04/save-the-country-vote-for-the-selective-biblical-principles-party/