Visualizing The last words of condemned Texans

A few weeks ago, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice published the last statements of 444 executed death-row inmates on their website.  Mark Schaver took the data and used IBM’s ManyEyes website to visualize the data in a variety of ways with some interesting results:

The most frequently used words of those about to die were “love” and “family.”

You can also see the most frequently used two-word phrases. Here “stay strong” was used twice as often as “Jesus Christ.”

via Depth Reporting: The last words of condemned Texans.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .