I’ve spent a bit of time working on some visualization & analysis of the speech given by Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary for last weeks release of 2011-12 Budget.
John Tsang Chun-wah, Hong Kong’s un-elected and little-liked Financial Secretary, has come under heavy fire since the budget was announced last week. Despite his assurances that the budget will ease the rising social and economic pressures that squeeze HK-ers every day, his budget (& political popularity) have been panned by an impressively broad collection of the population (even the police asked about participating in protest marches).
The lead image (above) is a standard word cloud from the English text of his speech, pulled from the official 2011-12 Budget site. I pulled the top 150 words with Wordle. The shading of the words is strictly aesthetic, it doesn’t correspond with any measurement or analysis.
The next two graphics are Phrase Nets created with tools at Many Eyes. Phrase Nets are meant to diagram “the relationships between different words in a text,” according to Many Eyes documentation.
The first graphic demonstrates key concepts within the speech by analyzing the placement of word pairs within sentences. The second displays keyword pairs from the text. Size represents frequency, colour indicates position (darker words come first) and arrows show how often a pair of words occur within a sentence. The thickness of the arrows indicate how often a pair of words appear together. Interactive versions of the graphics can be found on the Many Eyes site (links below).
2011-12 Budget: Key Concept Phrase Net (Click here for an interactive version).
2011-12 Budget: Keyword Phrase Net (Click here for an interactive version).
