Corbett's Shale Commission Recommendations, Visualized

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

August 1, 2011 | 10:00 AM

Governor Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission report has been public for a bit more than a week now.
The day after the 137-page document was released, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s Pipeline created a word cloud from of its language. This technique visualizes text by displaying words more prominently based on their frequency of use.
We took the idea a step further, and broke the the 46,000-word report’s four recommendation sections into their own separate word clouds.

Infrastructure (18 recommendations)

Public Health, Safety, and Environmental Protection (43 recommendations)

Local Impact and Emergency Response (9 recommendations)

Economic and Workforce Development (26 recommendations)

You can read our annotated version of the full report here.
(Created with Wordle.)