Circling the drain Project:1971 Watergate Transcripts

To look at the whole view of the 1971 Watergate transcripts visit here.

This first image below  is of an unfiltered/unaltered world cloud of transcripts from April to October of 1971. On initial glance of the graph below, notice that the words “president,” “ehrlichman,” “haldeman,” “unintelligible,” and “uh” are larger than the other words. This could mean that in the transcripts, these people are talking or they are being talked about. Two words mean that the words that were spoken were unintelligible to the transcriber and thus written down as such and the “uh” is a word that was spoken during these conversations many times.

From this moment on, I took out various words that distracted from the usefulness of the data by editing the list in Stopwords.

The image below is a graph (known as a TermsRadio graph in Voyant) during the time period of April to October of 1971.

The TermsRadio visualization let’s the user see what words were frequently used in a document and how it relates to a corpus over time. This is a great graph to use in this project because you can see what was discussed in 1971.

Feel free to interactive with this graph by changing how many words you wish to see by using the “Terms” slider or the “Speed” slider if you wish to see the animation go based on the number of documents. You can also zoom in and out by moving the “Visible” slider.

In this view, you can see how large the document is based on how big the block is. You can then search for words using the search bar and see how frequent the word is used in that particular document.

Feel free to play around with this graph by searching for words that you think might be in the Watergate transcripts. For example, you can search for the words “haldeman,” “nixon,” “mitchell,” just to name a few.

The view below states how many times a word has been used in a certain document within the corpus. It also states the distinctive words within each document.