Agent Orange, Conflicts of Past and Present

Here I have decided to perform a little experiment. I searched “Agent Orange” into Google and the first five pages that came up I have copied into Wordle.net. It is important to see what the internet first offers someone who is looking for answers to their questions. Here is what I came up with, For each one I removed the words Agent, Orange, Vietnam,  and U.S., so that those standard words would not detract from the focus of the writing.

The First entry was Wikipedia, of course, and here is the image presented

The majority of the words are Veterans, Chemical, Herbicide and Dioxin

The Second entry was from Public health.

The main words here are Veterans and Health

The third website was from Cancer.org

The words most emphasized here are Veterans, Studies, Cancer and Exposure

The fourth site was from History.com. There wasn’t anything striking about this entry, it seemed fairly general.

The final website was “makeagentorangehistory.org. This website is about a humanitarian relief effort to clean up the damage done by Agent Orange in Vietnam.

This website deals with the humanitarian relief effort to clean up Vietnam of the remaining dioxins. Hence the words having to do mainly with evoking emotions on the subject. Such as “Concern”, “opportunity”, “solutions”, “raise”, “wounds”, and “children.”

Over all the images provided through this mini experiment showed that many websites use evocative words in order to grasp readers. Most of what tends to come up are sites about medical conditions. It was neat to see the humanitarian website at the very end. It represents the data that I have noticed over this project concisely. Most of what I immediately found dealt with medical trials, and experiments to understand side effects. But to try and find data that agreed overall about the timeline or the history of herbicides themselves, proved to be a more daunting task. The occasional article about relief effort. Or an article may acknowledge the relief effort needed and its lack of funding. The charts above are representative of the information that I found in the process of developing this website. Each representation shows the variety of information on the subject of Agent Orange.