Snowclouds: Hannan and Brown
Updated on 27 March 2009
Daniel Hannan and Gordon Brown's European parliament speeches as interactive video word clouds: the bigger the word, the more times it was used.
Update: both clouds now include synchronised video
"Europe", "world" and "together" were the key words in the PM's speech. But for the MEP Hannan, "debt", "devalued" and "recession" loomed larger.
Click the images below to generate full-screen Snowclouds of the speech Gordon Brown made to the European parliament on Tuesday, and the blistering attack Hannan made in response.
Run the cursor over the words to see how often they appear.
Then click the word to see it in context in both a written transcript and a video of the full speech. You can also skip quickly between all its incidences in the speech.
Gordon Brown's speech
Daniel Hannan's response
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 only one or two letters, those listed here are ignored by the Snowclouds (not all of the words in the list necessarily cropped up in speeches today).


