The Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks at the Select Committee - what words did they use and how did they use them?

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks at the Select Committee - what words did they use and how did they use them? | Datastore

11:08 AM latest techno report No comments

James and Rupert Murdoch appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee this week to answer questions over phone-hacking. How did their words compare to those of Rebekah Brooks?
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James and Rupert Murdoch faced questions from MP's at the Culture, Media and Sport committee yesterday, but how does what they said compare with ex-News of the World editor, Rebekah Brooks?

From the transcripts we published earlier we have counted the words to see which words were the most frequent and to see what similarities differences there were between what they said. That's after putting the whole lot into a spreadsheet so we could separate out James from his father Rupert.

And James was the most loquacious of the lot: he used 10,016 words during the heardings, compared to 3,707 from his father and 5,351 from Rebekah Brooks.

But how can we show how those statements differed. Obviously, we've used Wordles a lot in the past, but what other approaches could we take?

There's one Many Eyes tool we haven't used before which allows an impressive you to really interact with each testimony. The word tree tool allows us to search for a particular word, then see where it occurred in each phrase. We've produced one for each of the three protagonists this week.

Rupert Murdoch's word tree

James Murdoch's word tree

Rebekah Brooks' word tree

If you take the entire word counts for each hearing, without hiving off the counts for each witness, you get a different picture. The word count does take into account all the words in the transcript so that would include the questions by the MPs. It does however give us a quick glance at the atmosphere of the hearings. The words legal, evidence and people cropped up often in the Murdoch hearings whilst information, story and know were more frequent in Brooks' hearing.

The table below shows the top keywords across the two hearings. How do the themes and subjects compare? You can find the full list in the spreadsheet below.

What can you do with the data?