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You are reading an article written by a citizen of eRepublik, an immersive multiplayer strategy game based on real life countries. Create your own character and help your country achieve its glory while establishing yourself as a war hero, renowned publisher or finance guru.

September 2010 CP Election: Ultimate TL;DR Version

Day 1,019, 07:10 • Published in Canada Canada

• by saltydog

The following are visualizations of the frequency distribution of words in Kazuo Leblanc's, Lan MacNess', and Rolo Tahmasee's CP-related articles. Layman's terms? The visualizations show how often each candidate used a word - bigger = more often, tiny = maybe once or twice.

This is the 4th time I have done the Ultimate CP Race TL😉R. The last 3 issues have been a huge success - even garnering a tweet from the author of the software itself!

Note: I have included all 3 candidates simply because all 3 of them ran serious races to achieve the nominations of the top 5 parties. Contrary to Rolo Tahmasee's statement in his final CP article, both Kazuo Leblanc and Lan MacNess made concerted attempts at scoring party nominations. As it stands, Rolo is the only candidate to have actually been nominated in-game, leaving a conspicuous blemish on this month's election. By not putting forward nominations on time (by the 3rd of the month, as the rule has been for months) the party presidents of the DAL, UN, CPF and EPIC have failed their members and the country by disregarding such a basic responsibility. Thanks to this top-level grouping of party presidents, we have only 1 official candidate in the offing, chosen by Acacia Mason as his de-facto successor. In the interests of furthering actual political debate in this country, I have elected to include the platform visualizations of the other 2 candidates.

The saying that a picture can be worth a thousand words is doubly true when the picture is made up of the words you choose to use. This really is the ultimate TL😉R version of a platform in that you can immediately see what a candidate was concerned with through his choice of words.

Information is power, and I firmly believe we have to get information about our candidates into the hands of our voters. This kind of approach is powerful because it is neutral - I am only processing data into a visual form from what was said by each candidate. To that end I offer some brief commentary on what the visualizations say to me, but I think it's more important to let the visualizations speak for themselves.

This month's visualizations show stark differences between each of the 3 candidates' platforms. The context of this month's election cycle has been shaped by the expectations created during the Acacia Mason term, which has left his successor with continued popular demand for war. Whether such war is strategically tenable or not is no longer widely discussed in the political discourse at large, as the people have clamoured for more of the fun stuff.

While war may be en vogue, Kazuo Leblanc's visualization shows that his platform was firmly centred around his vision of a "New Future" for eCanada. The detail of his platform articles is reflected in the busyness of his visualization, having published far more articles than either of the 2 other candidates combined - though largely overlooked by many.

Click to see full version

Bucking the war trend again is Lan MacNess, with a platform that shows an obvious focus on the management of citizen experiences through the initiatives of the Ministry of Education. While this may seem a distraction, the reality is that V2 has undoubtedly culled the total population, thus initiatives which focus on player training and retention may yet be all the rage.

Click to see full version

Then there is our annointed military choice, Rolo Tahmasee, with the obvious "WAR" particle right in the middle of his visualization. While his image is that of a hawk who aims to give the people what they want - "MOAR WAR" - it is interesting to note that if one does not include the phrase in the data input ( as Rolo admits it was explicitly intended to orient the results of the frequency distribution), Rolo's platform suddenly becomes much more boring: "weapons" and the "economy".

Click to see full version

Source texts were copied as they appeared in each article from beginning to end, excluding the titles. Once compiled, each candidate's dataset was loaded into Tagxedo for processing.The following settings were use😛

Theme:
'O Canada' FF0000 A10000 FF4D4D D10000 000000 FFFFFF FFDEDE

Empasis: 100%
Max Word Count: 600
Tightness: 150%
Color Variation: 50%
Hard Boundary: Yes
Allow Replication: No

Font:
ChunkFive

-saltydog[/size]

Comments

Hades III Day 1,019, 07:11

tl;dr

Nosyt Day 1,019, 07:13

~hyuu~

saltydog Day 1,019, 07:13

inb4thefollowers

Ralph Kline Day 1,019, 07:26

Rolo for the win!

Damien Wolf Day 1,019, 07:26

voted! i like how Rolo's has War in the middle.

Kazuo did have new which is pretty interesting 😉

TemujinBC Day 1,019, 07:52

Too bad Kazuo didn't win any endorsements from any party.

Gherk Day 1,019, 08:41

I'm sorry but I cannot vote for anyone who has sorry in their word leaf.

Dycey Farley Day 1,019, 09:01

I like the look of Rolo's!

juicyxeno Day 1,019, 09:49

Haha, I love how rolo has a nice big "War" in the middle.

Rainer N Day 1,019, 10:53

rolo had me at "WAR"

Stelawrat Day 1,019, 11:43

"I'm sorry but I cannot vote for anyone who has sorry in their word leaf."

That word struck me as well with it's unfortunate juxtaposition to Leblanc. I prefer to view it in connection with order, which is just above it and could be a reflection of the sorry state of the game just now.

As a representation of it's use in the articles put forward, I find it just as acceptable as I do, to find the equally mundane words, "things" in Lan's leaf and "fall" in Rolo's leaf, no better, no worse.

Sideswipe Day 1,019, 14:55

oh look, my name made it on Rolo's picture 😃

WolfGang III Day 1,019, 18:39

kool

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