The power of word counts

When I have an idle moment, I sometimes do word counts or even create wordles to find out subtle messages embedded in documents.

This afternoon, I happened across the information pack that was given to delegates (PCCs and their teams mostly) who attended the meeting on 23/1/13 that I have blogged about before. You will recall that this was a key strategic meeting convened by the Association of Police & Crime Commissioners and attended by senior Government figures and so forth. You can read more about the agenda and who attended at this link here. It makes for illuminating reading, I expect you will agree.

I thought it might be illuminating to see how often certain words were mentioned in the information pack. Here is a selection of some words that I selected:

• Public 38
• Funding 28
• Community 24
• KPMG 20
• Partnership 16
• Safety 11
• Private 10
• Victim/victims 8
• Capita 7
• Citizens 6
• Consultation 5
• Anti-social behaviour 5
• Engagement 1
• Innovation 0
• Harm 0
• Cooperation 0
• Communication 0

What do you read into this (brief) analysis?

I have also done a wordle too which you can see in the public gallery here in large scale. But here also is a pic of the wordle too:

The APCC did a wordle of the of PCCs most-cited concerns (from their manifestos) which is published here.