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Thursday, February 04, 2010

alberta's speech from the throne (2007 to 2010)

The Third Session of the 27th Alberta Legislature opened today with the Speech from the Throne. These speeches are usually feel good documents filled with rainbow and unicorn statements and little on actual details, so I have decided to save any analysis for the Provincial Budget announcement next week. Instead, I have created some interesting word-clouds of this year's Throne Speech and other speeches since Premier Ed Stelmach entered his current role. They give an interesting perspective of how the focus of the Speeches have evolved since 2007. (Thanks to Mack Male for the inspiration).


Speech from the Throne 2010


Speech from the Throne 2009



Speech from the Throne 2008



Speech from the Throne 2007

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Come on, Dave. Do some analysis. You're more than capable of it. Pretty pictures is CNN "journalism".

Anonymous said...

Good visuals, Dave. Note the big difference in the word "Government" between 2007 and 2010.

Neos said...

So did Hudema get Danielle Smith's number or what?

DJ Kelly said...

That's pretty much what I thought. Not much difference. That either means nothing much has changed over the past couple of years or, as you suggest, throne speeches don't mean much ("rainbows and unicorns").

Thanks for taking the time to do this Dave. Much appreciated.

Unknown said...

People are going to start calling you "Chart-Boy" pretty soon.

Anonymous said...

Wow, you ARE progressive! You're progressing nicely from presumption to utter and complete irrelevance.

I've seen more critical thought in a fortune cookie.

Mack D. Male said...

teesix have you read my blog? I think I'm safely "chart-boy" :)

Dave, I think word clouds are an effective tool to quickly visualize large amounts of text. The similarities really stand out.

Thanks for sharing!

Urban Spork said...

Pointless. How do you visually tell the difference when you didn't even use the same font for 2007 and 2010?

Anonymous said...

No more word clouds please.

Spud said...

I had to use two word-clouds in school. One was called the dictionary, and the other, a thesaurus. Check them out sometime!

I have now become enamoured with word clouds. I found one that may secretly hold the answer to life, the universe and everything. You won't see 42 in it anywhere.

http://tinyurl.com/ylyj88f

Anonymous said...

I suggest you do a word-cloud from the twitter posts on the airport closure debate. Then do a couple of word-clouds from Das Capital and the Communist Manifesto. Love to see the results!

Anonymous said...

Mack: what context do you get from a word cloud? None.