Resources of the Week: State of the Union Address
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
By the time you read the next "edition" of Resource of the Week, this year's State of the Union address will already have come and gone. President Bush will address Congress and the nation on Tuesday, January 23. We offer a few resources that will provide some background and perspective.
Sometimes you stumble across the coolest stuff when you aren't looking for it. Like this clever U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud, by Chirag Mehta, an IT manager who lives in Florida, not all that far from your editor. At the top of the page, when you first arrive here, you'll find a tag cloud for last year's State of the Union Address. But notice the slider directly above the tag cloud. As you move this to the right, the page will display -- in reverse chronological order -- tag clouds from State of the Union addresses and other presidential speeches as far back as John Adams's Foundation of Government speech in 1776. From the Adams speech at the extreme right, if you tease the slider a bit to the left, you'll see a tag cloud for the first State of the Union address, by George Washington in 1790. Compare some of the top tags here -- blessings, expedient, constitution, deliberations, providence, promoted, opinion -- with those from Bush's address last year -- economy, freedom, Iraq, terrorists.
Oddly enough, I looked for and did not find the the Gettysburg Address here, although the slider is a bit touchy and I may have cruised right by it. On the other hand, I did spot the Emancipation Proclamation (labor, slave, war).
Some information about this site from Mehta:
The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 AD.
Due to the lack of precise date information, I've had to estimate the date for some of the texts. Nevertheless, I think it gives quite a good overview of the word usage and consequently highlights the primary issues of the day.
Some other resources worth your time:
+ C-SPAN's State of the Union archive, which offers video and transcripts of State of the Union addresses by George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush. Transcripts only are available for Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald R. Ford, Richard M. Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Harry S. Truman.
+ The amazing American Presidency Project (University of California, Santa Barbara) offers a comprehensive collection of State of the Union addresses. History buffs could get lost here for hours, in the documents, data, audio/video archive and much, much more.
+ State of the Union is "a web based information system that provides access to data mined from the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2006. The focus of analysis and exploration is the relationship between individual documents and the entire corpus. The interface also makes available the searchable text of the addresses themselves, and contextualizing historical information. The user is invited to try and understand from this data the state we are in and the relationship of that state to the language which names it and calls it into being." Technologically fascinating site by Brad Borevitz.
+ The folks at askSam have made available a free searchable database of all State of the Union addresses from 1790-2006. You can search or browse online, or download the data to your own computer, to use with the askSam database program or free viewer.
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