Snowcloud: Speaker's statement
Updated on 19 May 2009
At a glance: the key words Speaker Michael Martin used in his statement on MPs' expenses, highlighted in our Snowcloud.
Yesterday Speaker Michael Martin made a statement on MPs' expenses to parliament, then struggled to maintain his authority in the points of order from MPs which followed. This Snowcloud condenses his words on the issue into one image: the bigger the word, the more often it was used.
"Order" loomed large with 15 mentions, used more than any word apart from "House", "Honourable" or "Gentleman". Although it also occurred in the phrase "points of order", Martin frequently had to call the members to order.
Click the image below to generate a full-screen, interactive Snowcloud of Martin's words, as recorded by Hansard.
Run the cursor over the words to see how often they appear.
Then click the word to find out how many times Martin used it, and in what context.
Comments from other MPs are omitted from the text - to see a full report of proceedings, see the Hansard transcript or watch the video here.
6)
About Snowclouds
Snowclouds are a Flash application designed by Channel 4 News's senior programme director, Martin Collett.
These interactive word clouds condense the text of a speech into one handy, interactive image. The more frequently a word is used during a speech, the bigger it is displayed. Clicking on the word brings up the transcript of the speech and shows the contexts in which the word was used.
The Snowcloud generator ignores common words such as "and", "the" and "there" to get a clearer picture of the distinct content of the speech.
As well as any word with fewer than three letters, those listed here are ignored by this Snowcloud (not all of the words in the list necessarily cropped up in the speech).
