From Our Archives: Visualizing Rick Perry's Book, "Fed Up"

In a "from the Tribune's archive" entry, we are republishing former Trib data editor Matt Hu-Stiles' work from last November when Gov. Rick Perry's Washington-bashing book Fed Up! first came out. With Perry's entry into the 2012 GOP presidential nomination contest, the book, of course, is receiving new scrutiny. 

As Hu-Stiles wrote in his original story, "I wondered how the book would render as a word cloud, a visualization technique that enlarges words by frequency. We obtained a digital copy of the book, which has 56,393 words (excluding footnotes and Newt Gingrich's foreword), and created the cloud below. Not surprisingly, Perry uses 'federal,' 'government,' 'people,' 'Washington' and 'states' most often."

Perry's favorite term for Social Security, the one getting all the attention on the campaign trail — "Ponzi scheme" — appears only twice. And "monstrous lie," which is what Perry called Social Security at an Iowa campaign stop over the weekend? Not once.