PostModernNews is recording specific events by crowdsourcing twitter and displaying the data as Dynamic Tag Cloud animations that reflect the flow of the event as reported by twitter users. Construction of the tag cloud also gives rise to an Entity Graph that represents statistics about selected entities which appear in the tag cloud.

• Dynamic Tag Cloud: The tag cloud displays the words found in a small window of time as it moves through the recorded messages. Words from new messages show up in red on the right side of the window and move to the left. Words that occur evenly across the window appear in the middle. Words that appear often are larger. Words that are darker carry more information. Selected words are colored green and may have lines radiating outward to other words that tend to occur in the same message. Words occurring with more than one selected word appear in a box with a maroon frame.



• Entity Graph: For each selected word or entity in the tag cloud, an entity graph is produced. The height of the graph represents whether entity messages are newer (high) or older (low). The darker the graph, the more often entity messages appear. Red areas indicate that a wide variety of other words can be associated with the entity. Blue indicates the opposite of red. Blue at the top of a line indicates a small number of associated words. Blue at the bottom indicates that only a small number of words are shared with other selected entities.

All the Dancing Tag Clouds can be viewed at the PostModernNews YouTube channel.

• Many of the entities have blue areas on the right-hand side of message peaks. This indicates that the words associated with that entity were duplicated in messages about other entities as the reporting on that event subsided. This blue behavior can be seen in the movie where the number of radiating lines from an entity decreases after it moves forward.
• Bachman (the misspelled form was selected intentionally), on the other hand, has red areas on the right-hand side of the peaks indicating that messages about her maintained a more independent vocabulary.
• The @Ronpaul entity maintains a constant dark red indicating a steady stream of messages with some independence. This entity does not have as many peaks and valleys as one might expect from responses to questions.
• While no longer a candidate at this time, Cain was included for comparison. His track is the lightest indicating a smaller number of messages.

The full analysis page contains extended visualizations.