Data Visualization

Bursty Baby Names

Z-score filtered bursty baby names. The Meertens Institute collects the popularity of baby names. I visualized the most 'peaky' or 'bursty' women's names, showing how popular culture impacts naming.

A Year in News

The Dutch Public Broadcaster (NOS) is my main source of news. What did their website talk about in 2023? Using BERTopic I identified themes and plotted their frequency over time, as well as the 'novelty' of the topic distribution.

Algemene Politieke Beschouwingen

The "Algemene Politieke Beschouwingen" traditionally form the highlight of the Dutch parliamentary year. This visualization shows the first term based on segments tied to a particular speaker, with interruptions as markers colored by party.

Connected Words

The meaning of a concept is defined in relation to its neighbors. Using Word2Vec models, I construct networks of words that reveal important terms in semantic fields around a target word. This is the network generated for 'bureaucratie'.

Unfolding Debates

Inspired by the work of Stefanie Posavec, who visualizes novels by plotting sentences as lines. I did the same for parliamentary debates, visualizing every speech as a line colored by party and turning 90 degrees.

Political Affairs

Our propensity for calling things 'affairs' has changed. In this visualization, I list all the words that end with '-affaire' mentioned in Dutch postwar Lower House debates in order of appearance. Scatter sizes indicate the z-scored frequency.

Crisis!

'Crisis'-compounds in Dutch newspapers over time. Taking words ending with 'crisis' from the KB Ngram Collection yields a cross-section of crisis-talk over the years. I categorized the words and counted the number of different compounds per year.

Distinctive Parties

The most distinctive terms in party manifestos for the 2023 elections as measured with Pointwise Mutual Information.

Zetelhoppen

Politicians in the Dutch House of Representatives tend to change parties now and then. This visualization shows movements between parties.

Partijtaal

Party manifestos are full of words. They often tell more about a party than one might expect.

Coalition Influence

Political coalition coalesce partisan plans. But whose sentences end up in the final document?