Cloudsourcing Political Opinion

Steve de Brun
3 min readSep 20, 2015

This past week, we asked 500 people who use our app, MicroHero, “What’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of…” and then followed this with “Hillary Clinton” “Bernie Sanders” “Donald Trump” and “Jeb Bush.”

We then ran these word associations through an online word cloud generator called WordItOut. Words are only displayed if at least two people used them, and the more frequently a word was used, the larger it appears.

We are going to refrain from making specific conclusions about the perception of these candidates, as that was not the objective. Our objective was to run an experiment with a relatively small sample size (500) to see if some interesting trends emerge. Perhaps the politicians and their advisors will get some benefit from this as it provides an instant way to visualize peoples’ perception of their candidate. At a minimum, this is an interesting exercise that provides a window into the “soundbitiziation” of politics, and how it influences public opinion.

Please note that the use of word clouds can be controversial and, depending on the algorithm and data set, can do more harm than good. I think it’s a pretty good match for this experiment because of the way we framed the question: “What’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of Hillary Clinton?”

I hope that you find this interesting and, at a minimum, thought-provoking. We’d love to see what these tag clouds look like with a larger sample size — 500 is hardly enough. So on that note, we’ve posted a public version of this survey here and encourage you to take 30 seconds to add to what we hope will be a larger, more nuanced data set.

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Steve de Brun

Co-founder of Datavest, MicroHero and StockTouch iOS apps. UX/UI/Creative Director and product person. Kite and regular surfer.