For the first time, the main Prime Ministerial candidates for the 2010 UK General Elections, will take part in three live debates. Since the BBC have kindly made the full transcripts available, I decided to have a go at analyzing the data and creating a visual representation in the form of word clouds. I am currently working on my own visualization software, but in the meantime these have been done using Wordle.

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I haven’t posted an opinion piece before, and I may be opening myself up to a whole world of pain by starting with this one, but this idea has been gathering momentum around the internet for a while now and I wanted to respond to it with a little more elucidation than that afforded by a tweet or a facebook flame war. For the record, I am not opposed to the Robin Hood Tax in the same way that I oppose Scientology or Jeremy Clarkson, but generally speaking it’s a good idea to be critical and to not take everything at face value.

Disclaimer : this is an opinion piece. I trust that people are capable of using Google to research the facts, though if you’re planning on using Wikipedia I should mention that this article has nothing to do with the film starring Kevin Costner or any episodes of Star Trek.

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