The New York Times has begun producing a useful debate transcript analyzer. The analyzer allows you to not only view the video and transcript of a debate, but also view how much time the candidates had to speak, how many words they said, and the order in which they spoke. This tool can be used on both Republican and Democratic debates that have occurred since December 12, 2007.

One really nice feature of the analyzer is that allows you to perform a word or phrase search of the transcript which visually identifies who spoke about that subject and when. You can even jump to a section of the video transcript where a particular subject is being discussed.

For those of you who feel the Times is a biased newspaper that can’t be trusted to be fair, I can assure you the analyzer contains no comment or analysis from the Times. It is an unbiased tool that you can use to dissect the transcript and reach your own conclusions- as it should be.