Comparing Obama's Speeches
Last week President Obama gave his first State of the Union Speech, and we thought it would be an interesting exercise to see the changes in emphasis between Obama’s speech last year and his most recent address.
In order to illustrate the differences we’ve created the following two images that compare the SOTU and his February 24th, 2009 address to the joint session of Congress.
The images were created by determining the frequency with which each word was used in the two speeches then creating an Index score for each word, which shows the relative increase or decrease in usage of the word.
An index score of 100 would mean that Obama used the word just as frequently in the SOTU as he did in the joint session; anything above 100 means the word was used more frequently in the SOTU, anything below 100 means its frequency decreased. Each image below uses a reference point “refpt,” which is highlighted in red, representing “100,” or perfect symmetrical use, for comparison.
In the first image with the white text on a black background, the smaller the word the LESS frequently it was used in 2010 compared to 2009, while the image with black text on a white background shows the opposite – the larger the word the MORE frequently it was used in 2010 than in 2009.
Let us know what you think by posting comments.
- Brent Seaborn
Comments on this entry
Hey, that's a very interesting idea. With so many speeches from this guy, you could almost create a video clip with words growing and shrinking as the national mood turns against Obama's policies. Very cool, guys.