“PEOPLE” – 61 times; “WALKER” – 39 times; “TEACHERS” – 32 times; “STUDENTS” – 29 times; “UNION/UNIONS” – 53 times; “STATE” – 49 times; “MONEY” – 25 times; “RIGHT/RIGHTS” – 54 times; “EDUCATION” – 17 times; View a larger image

You don’t need us to tell you how crazy the past month has been. Unless you go out of your way to avoid all media and conversations with neighbors, you’ve heard about the hubbub in Madison surrounding the budget proposals of Gov. Scott Walker.

Volume One has followed the more local devlopments as best as we can. Every time we’ve heard about a local event – a rally, walkout, protest, appearance, any of it from any side – we posted it to our website and Facebook page. In turn we experienced an overwhelming number of comments regarding this divisive and heated topic. To give you an idea of the sheer quantity, our Facebook page alone totaled more than 15,000 words of comment on the topic. That’s equal to roughly half of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Or 13 times the length of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. Or 124 times the length of this very paragraph.

The volume of comments gave us an opportunity to try this text-based visualization where the most popular keywords look the largest, and less popular ones smallest (it pulls out common short words). So here, you see the 100 most popular words from the more than 13,000 on Facebook and VolumeOne.org combined.

While the value of such an excercise may be limited, one can make several observations. For instance, notice a fairly low amount of “negative” verbs compared to positive ones like proud, best, great, etc. Also, you don’t see a lot of partisan terms floating to the top either.
Again, what conclusions you make are subjective and argumentative (depending on who’s making them), but such a breather to identify common themes in the debate might be helpful in understanding what we can all find in common at a time like this.