administration (9) american (37) become (9) bring (11) communist (9) forces (20) freedom (9) nation (19) negotiations (13) north (9) paris (8) peace (34) people (21) plan (13) policy (17) president (17) south (28) states (11) united (12) vietnam (53) vietnamese (12) war (45) withdrawal (18) world (12) years (13)
created at TagCrowd.com
Above is a word cloud I created using Richard Nixon’s address to the nation on Vietnam. Well it was meant to be a word cloud but for some reason its presenting itself in the format above. I’ve taken a screen shot of the tag cloud here. 
Notice that the words most commonly mentioned are in a larger font then the other words. The word cloud generator that I used to create this cloud also allows for the frequency at which the word in question appears to be shown. Smaller words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘or’ etc. are left out of the tag cloud. The tag cloud thus acts as a quick way to analyse a policy speech or document by simply feeding it into a tag cloud generator and seeing the frequency at which thematic or ideologically loaded words are used.
Notice that the words most commonly mentioned are in a larger font then the other words. The word cloud generator that I used to create this cloud also allows for the frequency at which the word in question appears to be shown. Smaller words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘or’ etc. are left out of the tag cloud. The tag cloud thus acts as a quick way to analyse a policy speech or document by simply feeding it into a tag cloud generator and seeing the frequency at which thematic or ideologically loaded words are used.If you want to get the best of a tag cloud generator, you are best deciding which words you consider to be important. Take the example above. As we can see, Nixon repeatedly uses the word ‘war’, often in conjunction with the word ‘Vietnam’, which would seem to make sense as the topic under discussion is the Vietnam war. However the word ‘peace’, which only appears 12 times in contrast to ‘war’s 45 mentions. You could interpret this as meaning that Nixon is far more in favour of war then he is of peace, although in fact almost the opposite is true. Nixon wants peace but on his terms.
Tag clouds are a nice way of visualizing a speech. As a teaching and training method, word clouds do allow the teacher to greater engage the students and encourage interactive participation. However, as a policy analysis tool, word clouds are limited. What they do provide is quick and handy word counts, but separate from proper analytical study the word counts are somewhat pointless on their own.
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