Leaders' debate: the Datablog analysis

Can body language win you an election? If the furore over Nick Clegg's performance in the first leaders' debate is anything to go by, maybe it can. We wanted to work out exactly how Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and David Cameron spoke to each other last night on Sky news , what kind of words they used and how they treated the other candidates. So, we looked at how many times they used certain phrases. I wanted to know if anyone said "I agree with Nick", for instance. And while nobody did that this time, there were some revealing results - Gordon Brown used first names of the other candidates repeatedly, while Nick Clegg didn't use a first name once. And, after all the talk of how Clegg looked directly at the camera last week, David Cameron repeatedly (and sometimes awkwardly) turned to camera in the middle of his sentences more times than anyone else. It's admittedly not the most scientific data we've ever put on the Datablog - this is what I recorded last night. But let me know what you can do with it - or if there was anything we missed. Download the data • DATA: download the full list as a spreadsheet Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at [email protected] World government data • Search the world's government datasets • More environment data • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter