The Andrew Marr show

Sunday 29th January 2012.

Tuned into BBC1 on Sunday 29th January 2012 to catch the end of The Andrew Marr Show. First person I saw was Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. His views are of interest to me, as a lot of my customers claim benefits and may be affected by welfare reform. Also, I'm attending Benefits Camp on Friday 3rd February 2012.

As I had missed most of the programme, I turned to Twitter to see what was going on. The hashtag #AndrewMarr seemed quite popular, so I followed that one. Most of the comments I saw were negative and against Iain Duncan Smith. But being an objective kind of chap, I decided to see what all of the #AndrewMarr tweets looked like, in the form of a word cloud: -

Based on these results, I'm definitely going to watch the whole programme on the iPlayer.

I created this cloud as follows: -

  • Load searchhash.com and search for hashtag #AndrewMarr between 2012-01-29 and 2012-01-30

  • Download the results in CSV format, then upload them into a Google spreadsheet

  • Visually inspect the spreadsheet, format the column sizes and make sure my search is correct

  • Copy the entire "tweet" column into the clipboard (basically, anything that anyone tweeted)

  • Load http://tagul.com and create a new cloud, then paste the clipboard into the source window

  • Select case=lower (force all text into lower case) and filter out common English words

  • At this point I visualise the word cloud to see how it looks

  • Filter out all the presenters and guests names + their abbreviations, e.g. IDS

  • Filter out one and zeebox (a social networking television website)

  • Change the word cloud shape to look more like a cloud

  • Visualise it again, happy with the results and saved it off

  • Try the interactive version at http://tagul.com/preview?id=49106@1 (works best with a device that has a mouse or pen)