Text Analysis

               Not too sure what we were meant to write our blog in relation to this week, but judging by everyone elses posts and what we were doing in class last week, I would think that text analysis is a safe bet! I used Martin Luther King Jr's I Have A Dream speech because I figured it would be interesting to see just how frequently he utteres that symbolic sentence. The speech from August 1963 is about five minutes long,  both videos and transcripts are easily available.

               First I ran the text through TAPoR which was useful for getting the specific figures and statistics about the most common used words the epic speech.

Words	Distribution	Count
freedom		21
let		13
negro		13
ring		12
day		12
dream		11
nation		10
come		10
today		9
satisfied		8
able		8
american		7
justice		7
men		6
long		6
time		6
white		6
children		5
great		5
america		5
free		5
new		5

Thankfully the text analysis software allows for the use of words like "a" and "the" and so on, so it's really just the specific words that are frequent and therefore important to a specific speech that are given in the results. "Dream" appears sixth in the list which is relatively high up considering there are 1920 words in the whole speech including the so called "stop" words. I however tought that it would have been the most frequently used word, listyening to the speech in the past it seemed to me that every second sentence was "I Have a Dream". Other popular words, as you can see from the graphics above, are "negro", "nation" and "American" but the word used most, 21 times to be exact, is "freedom" which isn't really surprising considering that freedom is the central topic of the speech.


               With a bit of time to spare I used the same text in Wordle. It didn't have as many options for text analysis as TAPoR did (ie there wasn't as much fiddling around to be done) as this software is solely for making word clouds. I figured Id give it a go anyway, make a pretty picture out of one of the most famous speeches in history!


<a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2774812/i_have_a_dream"
          title="Wordle: i have a dream"><img
          src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/2774812/i_have_a_dream"
          alt="Wordle: i have a dream"
          style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>

               The html code above doesn't seem to be working so hopefully you will be able to view my word cloud here.