Similar Text Analyses Recently in the News

State of the Union Speech

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about President Obama's State of the Union speeches. It included the following infographic that uses word counts to measure the importance of common themes.

Books changing over time

The February 2013 issue of Smithsonian Magazine included a sidebar about the edits that Charles Darwin made to The Origin of the Species over its multiple editions. Word counts, as grouped by paragraphs, sections, and other units illustrate the changes. It used images from this website. See all of the links under the heading “(En)tangled Word Bank”.

Related work

The same authors, a scientist and an artist, have similar analyses for other books. See all of the links under the heading “Writing without Words”. On a more artistic bent, see their album cover work for OK Go's Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. See all of the links under the heading “OK Go — Album”.

Returning to Darwin's The Origin of the Species, there is a similar analysis of changes over time made independently with a different visual representation.

Lord of the Rings

Finally, with the popularity of the recent Lord of the Rings movies, a book-oriented fan site includes a searchable word count analysis of the books. Its data is broken down by pages, presumably from the original editions.