Word Frequency Histograms of the US 2004 Vice-Presidential Debate

Colored by Candidate

• Some proper nouns
• Some phrases I found interesting to track
• The most common words in spoken English
• phrases spoken more than 3 times
• all the data

Candidate-Specific

• Richard Cheney (Total 7392 words spoken, average length 5.0227 letters, from a vocabulary of size 605)
• John Edwards (Total 8192 words spoken, average length 5.9353, from a vocabulary of size 525)
• the moderator (Gwen Ifill)

Questions and Answers

What's this about?

See the First Presidential debate histogram page for more information.

Anything different with this one?

It was much faster because I had the code mostly written. That and I found an easier to edit transcript. (Conclusion: CNN is much better than MSNBC for this purpose.)

Why are the "interesting words" mostly the same?

I did this for the first debate because it felt to me like the candidates were often putting words in each other's mouths and I wanted to see if they were really saying those things attributed to them. (For instance, Bush's "grand diversion" quote.) This debate I didn't get that feeling, so there weren't phrases that I cared much about.