It’s hard to measure the success of a movement as massive as Occupy Wall Street. Did they succeed? Did they change the world? I wanted to explore the idea that some of their rhetoric– the cries of the 99%– may have crept into lawmaker’s political discourse, and that could be one measure of success.

Using the Capitol Words API, I text-mined the Congressional Record for mentions of the most important words to the Occupy Movement, and compared this data to Congress’ overall rhetoric. I looked at September – December 2011 and compared it to the baseline years of 2007 and 2009.

This tree map shows what Congress spends its time talking about, and how many words they devote to the issues of the Occupy Movement and the 99%. Track the changes in Congressional rhetoric from 2007-2011.

Mouse over any rectangle to see how frequently a word appeared in the Congressional Record during a particular month. Words with an asterisk appear in both the Top 100 Words in the Congressional Record for a given month and in Occupy Wall Street’s top rhetoric.

Are We Speaking the Same Language? Visualizing the Impact of the Occupy Movement through Rhetoric

If the embed isn’t working, click here for a better view in Tableau.

Here’s an alternate view of the same data, that shows the frequency of Occupy words (in red and pink) against the greater stream of Congressional discourse.

To see the word cloud over all three years click here or download a high res PDF.

Data Sources:
Occupy Rhetoric comes from Occupy Data NYC and Mike Konczal (rortybomb)
The Top 100 words (by TFIDF and count) are pulled from the Congressional Record using the Capitol Words API
Download my data in XLSX format.