Parse the farce
Did you find last night’s State of the Union speech unwatchable? Try looking at it another way. Once again, style.org offers a nice way to visualize the spin: the State of the Union Parsing Tool. Enter in a couple of terms and see maps of their occurrence across all of Bush’s SOTUs. Compare a Bush SOTU against ones by Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Clinton.
To get you started, here’s a screenshot of Bush’s SOTUs mentioning Iraq (red) and oil (blue). Click on it to visit the tool, and then try tracking your own terms:
What this tool won’t do is tell you how often assembled lawmakers hauled themselves out of their chairs for standing ovations. But some things are best left unvisualized.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 2:24 PM and filed under Metawriting. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.
This is great. Did you catch that the NYT did something simliar?
words graphic
It was funny - a collegue of mine at work commented that reducing a speech to keywords is very Web2.0-ish. This hadn’t even occurred to me, probably because I had been familiar with this technique from psychohistory (not Asimov’s - the real thing).
Have you ever heard of fantasy analysis? It’s not exactly the same as word frequency, but its close.
Posted on 06-Feb-06 at 4:15 pm | Permalink