Government - Written Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by Naumi Haque - 1 Comment

Analyzing the State of the Union: Speeches as data points

Last week President Obama addressed the nation in his second State of the Union. Analyzing these speeches has been an interest of mine for some time, but I’m struck by how much better the analytics tools have become. Even if you don’t care about the State of the Union, it’s interesting to see how words, texts, and public response have become data that is now easily accessible and measurable. Speeches are meant to move, inspire, and articulate a vision. To view them as simple data points may seem crude to some, but the latest informatics capabilities are actually used to record emotional response—how inspiring was Obama?

When I originally started looking State of the Union addresses, I simply found transcripts online and did a manual count of words in text documents. This was laborious, but provided some interesting findings (note sites like Speech Wars can now automate this process). Last January I highlighted Wordle and used tag clouds to create a visualization of State of the Union addresses from notable past Presidents. This year, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching sentiment analysis, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that vendor Crimson Hexagon and CNN had teamed up to analyze public sentiment towards the 2010 State of the Union in real-time. Check out the video after the jump.

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