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Show HN: I built a site to compare Presidential Candidates speeches side-by-side
- jabo 6y agoHey everyone, this is a weekend project I built - it lets you search through US Presidential candidates’ speeches for topics and see what both candidates have said side-by-side (on a largish screen). My thinking is that with all the divisive misinformation making their rounds these days, hearing what both candidates have said first-hand on the same topic presented in a side-by-side format, could help inform people of all perspectives in an unbiased way.
- RangerScience 6y agoThis is neat, and I really appreciate it! Some thoughts: If there's a way to dilineate between education in a title versus a topic ("Secretary of Education", "patriotic education"), might be good. I'm finding it weirdly hard to go from "the word is here" to "this is the context in which it was said". Some thoughts: If there's a way to always have the search term centered in the block of text, ala that speed reading program. Less aggressive highlighting. Maybe just change the font color, instead of highlighting and spacing. Maybe change the text color of the sentence that it's in (as well), to help me quickly find the start and end of the most-relevant sentence?
- jabo 6y agoThank you for the UI feedback. Are you referring to the text in the main cards, or in the modal when you click on “Read in context”? Re: differentiating between titles vs topics, that would be a hard thing to do with the current setup I have, which is for doing keyword-based searches.
- boogies 6y agoWould you be interested in expanding this to other candidates (like those in other races, running for Vice President, or nominated by other parties)? Would it add significantly more work?
- jabo 6y agoI’d love to. If you’re able to find a repository of transcripts for the speeches, I can add them to the index. May be users can then pick which two candidates to see side-by-side.
- boogies 6y agoI’m not certain exactly what to look for, but ducking “«nominee name» speech transcript” for each of the top three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_United_States#Minor_parties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_Unite... brings these acceptance speeches as the respective top results: https://www.democracyinaction.us/2020/thirdparty/lpconvjorgensen.html https://www.democracyinaction.us/2020/thirdparty/lpconvjorge... https://howiehawkins.us/hawkins-nomination-speech/ https://howiehawkins.us/hawkins-nomination-speech/ https://www.democracyinaction.us/2020/thirdparty/constitutionpartyconvention.html https://www.democracyinaction.us/2020/thirdparty/constitutio... (I can’t seem to find any big repository like rev’s, which for some reason seems to have only speeches from the Democrats, Republicans, and Birthday Party: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/kanye-west-rally-speech-transcript-in-south-carolina-july-19 https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/kanye-west-rally-speech...)
- Judgmentality 6y agoI'm not trying to be snarky here, but are you using 'ducking' as a verb for using duckduckgo? I ask because that makes sense in context, but I naturally assume that word to be a more polite version of 'fucking' because that's how I'm used to seeing it being used. Is ducking something people say?
- boogies 6y agoYes to the first question, and also to the second if you count me and DDG’s (paid) marketing material’s authors (IDK about anyone else) :)
- etwigg 6y ago
- magwa101 6y agoThis is amazing! Differences are so obvious. It would be great to cluster other co-occurring words and use them to get more context when matching between the speakers. Or sprinkle with synonyms. But as is, it's eye opening.
- pjc50 6y agoSo, the problem with this stuff is that the content is one thing, but just like the semantic web the semantics are quite another thing. What does proposal X or claim Y mean? For example, "We will stop the radical indoctrination of our students and restore patriotic education to our schools." What does "racial indoctrination" refer to? What does "patriotic education" refer to? I have a strong idea, but that's just my opinion.
- sosodev 6y agoIs that something the website could solve?
- xupybd 6y agoPoliticians try to stir as many emotions as possible without actually saying much. That way they don't have to follow through with anything but still get people motivated to support them.
- jabo 6y agoThat's a good point and would be cool to have that. I built this primarily to act as a starting point for keyword searches. Hopefully the quotes from the candidates are intriguing enough to prompt further independent research. Do you know any datasets that provide good unbiased definitions of these terms that candidates use? Let me know if you do, I can index them and add to the UI.
- pjc50 6y agoI don't think unbiased (or at least, unsubjective) definitions of "educational", "racial", or "patriotic" are even possible.
- mistermann 6y agoI'd like to propose an idea - I'm not saying it's a good idea, just an idea. Rather than incorporating "datasets that provide good unbiased definitions of these terms that candidates use", allow users (ideally quality controlled in some magical way) to annotate specific words and phrases, and attach comments to them (like: "We will stop the radical indoctrination of our students and restore patriotic education to our schools." What does "racial indoctrination" refer to? What does "patriotic education" refer to?) This would then make the site not just a useful informational tool, but also add a social media meta-conversation type of layer on top - in the case of the above comments, revealing to other users the vacuousness of political rhetoric, which a lot of people seem to take at face value, as a sincere and honest representation of true (as opposed to truthy) intent. Politics is largely disingenuous theatre imho, I think it would be healthy for this to be pointed out to people more often. Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this, one of which is that cynical people like me would use it for shitposting and that sort of thing. To that, I would suggest forcing a user to choose some sort of a ~perspective from which they are posting, and to be honest and take things seriously (and enforce this with an iron fist) - so in my case, I would often choose "Hyperbolic Cynicism" and treat the whole thing like the mockery that I perceive it to be (here I mean: both candidates, and the entire system). And other users could have the option of filtering out idiot comments like mine (or, choose to only see comments of this kind, or whatever the individual prefers). And then in addition to speeches, you could also host various news articles, and let people do the same thing. Yes, there is noteworthy overlap with Reddit and many other sites, but there's also plenty of leeway for significant differentiation. Of course, this would significantly change (and add risk to) the nature of your website, so perhaps you could do a completely different, renamed/unaffiliated version of it and tries this angle out. Anyways, just an idea. Overall, I think it's a good idea and really nicely done, good job.
- sosodev 6y agoPretty clean website! One concern I have is the comparison of speeches made relatively far apart. References to Covid in March are going to be pretty dated when compared to references made in October.
- jabo 6y agoThanks! The results are sorted by recency independently on both sides. So it should show the most recent comment a candidate has made on top by default, unless you choose to sort a column differently in the UI. My hope was that providing a way to sort by recency will also help show candidates' position changes over time.
- tobr 6y agoI searched for “crypto”, and it reports 34 results, but all of them seem to be creative ideas about which other words I might have misspelled, like “crystal”, “creator” or “scripture”.
- jabo 6y agoThat's typo correction kicking in. If a term (like crypto) has zero or very few occurrences in the candidates' speeches, the typo correction logic kicks-in and starts looking for additional results that are close misspellings of the word. I'm thinking of indicating in the UI, when typo corrected results show up in the results vs the original search terms.
- rtkwe 6y agoYou should definitely at least indicate "no references found" and maybe respect common search engine flags like quotes, minus to exclude words specifically, etc.
- benjaminjosephw 6y agoThat's a misleading feature. If you search "Climate" for example, it's helpful to know that one candidate has a lot more to say than the other. Instead, you're filling the results with searches for "ultimate" (as a close misspelling?) and making it appear that they both speak about this equally. Are there really lots of misspellings in these speech transcripts? Why not just turn off this misspelling feature if has a potential to mislead? Surely that's better than the much more unlikely chance of missing out a potentially relevant result that happens to have a typo.
- a_imho 6y agoDoes not work in older browsers 'flat is not a function'.
- 1024core 6y agoWhere did you get the speeches from?
- jxramos 6y agoIs there any sense to the alignments across the row? or are they just all chronologically ordered or something. Ah just noticed the `Recent Fist`, `Oldest First`. So it's two streams side by side. Might help to avoid making equally sized rows in the two columns to avoid visually suggesting a pairing is going on.
- jabo 6y agoYeah, they’re two side-by-side streams. I can see how that can make it confusing. I initially had the rows take up only as much space as the words, but ran into problems further down with positioning the common Show More button where one stream would run longer than the other because I currently load a fixed number of rows per stream. I then would have to detect how many rows are needed to fill up each stream and load the appropriate number. Got lazy and decided to skip the complexity for a weekend project!
- RayK243 6y agoExcellent start! Can't wait for V2.
- csteubs 6y agoAwesome tool, Jason!
- brittojesus 6y agocool
- brittojesus 6y agoWow .... Brilliant
- gyudin 6y agoDo I understand correctly that they spend years preparing for a presidential race, but can't sit down with their teams and make a roadmap on what they plan to achieve in 4 years? So in 4 years we can actually see what they have achieved. Is that really that much to ask?
- lopmotr 6y agoI imagine such detail wouldn't make it to the news. That probably exists but nobody cares because they'll lose interest before they get half way through reading it. Same way that (almost) nobody cares about side-by-side searching of their speeches. There are also voting records that you can look at to see what they really stand for, but again, nobody cares enough to bother.
- mikeomoto 6y agoRandomly clicked on "amendment", which shows noticeably different topics for biden vs trump. Trump mainly speaks about 'the second amendment', whereas biden tends to use it more colloquially. Perhaps an n-gram search for multi-term searches and then settling on the top one?
- onecommentman 6y agoVery nice, clean, fast and relevant. There is the concept of an “interlinear”, text inserted in between lines of an existing text, usually translations but not always. The inserted text could be a “reading between the lines” of the original text. As in the novel “Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca” by Haniel Long (I’ll mention that Henry Miller wrote an introduction to an edition of it, a recommendation for some). I have wondered whether, for public speeches, someone could put together a wiki-like site so the public would be able to make comments (“interlinears”) on each single sentence of a given public speech. So one page of comments per sentence, or perhaps even a single phrase. The structure, rigorously enforced, of focusing comments on the meaning and implications of a single sentence might keep the troll noise down or at least make moderating easier. The current rantfest in comments on political content is discouraging.
- etwigg 6y agoThis is a great UI, but the quality of the results will depend on the selection bias of the inputs. For example, if you used rally speeches for one side, vs prepared speeches for the other side, that would skew things quite a bit. Can you elaborate on the corpus which is backing this? I've been working on something similar, but it's got less to say because we've constrained ourselves to just the presidential debates, since they're "fair". https://mytake.org/search?q=supreme%20court https://mytake.org/search?q=supreme%20court I'm a big fan of "provably neutral" project to try to bring reality into politics, so I hope your project is successful!
- pvaldes 6y agoIt covers less than 50% of the candidates, so is not really complete, but is a good effort. In any case, facts say more than speeches. Politicians just say that their public is expecting, so there are a lot of cherrypick in the concept of having webs like these. Examples: Covid is at the same time "very worrying and letal" or "nothing to be afraid of, the people wearing masks are pussy" depending on the public To have a webpage comparing the speech of each candidate against himselves under different publics would be much more interesting.