While most of us processed Barack Obama's inauguration speech by assessing our emotional or intellectual reactions, you could also evaluate the speech's place in history by taking a close look at its "word cloud." Words like "nation," "common" and "people" revealed Obama's intention to make a wide appeal, while words like "new" and "forward" look like substitutes for his campaign buzzword "change."
When comparing Bush's 2005 speech (the bottom image here) with Obama's, it's obvious that Obama didn't favor any word as much as Bush favored "freedom." Read Write Web also generated world clouds for Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Abraham Lincoln's inaugural speeches. Bill Clinton went heavy on the words "new" and "century," while "government" dominated Reagan's speech. In Lincoln's first inaugural, the most prominent word was "war."
Mark Davis
Mike & Chris
Satellite
I thought Obama's speech was perfect--until Jon Stewart made fun of it and suggested that it had echoes of the rhetoric that Bush has used in past speeches. The joke on the show was that Jon had "crapped all over the memory of it" and, excuse the crassness, but he did! Now, I won't hear it the same way at all!
1I'll have to check out what Jon said tonight - but I thought it was a good speech. There are lots of ways two people can say the same thing but mean something entirely different.
2I love how "freedom" is so big in Bush's cloud
3This is a really cool idea.
4Interesting.
"Freedom"...like the freedom to talk on the phone without the NSA listening in, sans warrants?
5Jude, if you weren't a terrorist you wouldn't be worried about silly things like liberty and privacy. I think you need to mellow out.
6
7You only need to mellow if you're yellow though.
8the website you can do this on, Wordle, is one of my favs:)
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