remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
Submitted by jajacobs on Fri, 2006-11-03 11:59.
US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud by Chirag Mehta, 2 Nov. 2006.
An interesting remix of public documents! Mehta got more than 360 speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 and created a "tag cloud" much like you see on del.icio.us (and like our own del.icio.us tag cloud in the left-hand side-bar of this page).
On Mehta's site, larger font size indicates more use of the word and different colors indicate newer and older use. There is a slider-control at the top of the page that allows you to view the clouds for each document.
As we often mention, such re-use of public information should be an explicit goal of government information policy.
Interestingly, Mehta got the documents from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com, not from government sources directly.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
The clouds of war
One thing that struck me about the cloud tag is how huge President Bush's tag of "Terrorist" is compared to the tag "wartime" and other war related words in the SOTU speeches done by Roosevelt from 1942-1945.
It's like you can graphically see the fear in the speeches in the 2000s that were missing from the speeches of the 1940s -- a time where America faced a far greater danger than it does today.
I wonder how tag clouds would look if you could do something similar for an entire adminstration as opposed to just the President. Would it yield some sort of zeitgeist for that administration? Or at least the zeitgeist they hoped to project.
And like Jim says, projects like this are only possible with public domain, easily manipulated information. So let's do what we can to keep government information that way.
------------------------------------
"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.
Post new comment