For this project, I decided to take data from around 100 comments on articles announcing that the Boston bomber may be eligible for the death penalty. I have sort of a morbid fascination with how happy people seem to be able to get about other people being executed. I got a bunch of comments from several different news sites (but essentially the same article) with Kimono and found the most common words in the comments. I discounted words that show up in basically all written English, like ‘and’ or ‘the’. I coincidentally already had an excel sheet for finding the most common words in blocks of text, so I used that to find them. I did encounter a couple of websites that didn’t work with Kimono, but most did, so it wasn’t a major problem. I also had to continue to struggle with JavaScript, and I’m starting to hate it slightly less!

Trying to get the D3 imbedded properly below, but here is the screenshot. Winner of most surprising word is probably “virgins.”