Word Clouds of the State of the Union Addresses from President George W. Bush

I've noticed a lot of word clouds from the presidential debates lately (first debate, VP debate, second debate) and it got me to wondering what other speeches look like. Word clouds show the frequency of words used based on size and can give you some idea what the important themes of the text is. The more times a word is used the larger (and often darker color) it is in the cloud. This should be very familiar to anyone who uses sites like del.icio.us with their tag clouds. In addition to the information shown graphically, word clouds are just cool as art.

I really wondered, what would the State of the Union address look like over time? As Article II, Section 3 of the US Constitution says: He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.

Comparing each year would show a glimpse of what important happened in the previous year and what the future holds as seen through the eyes of the President. To do this I found the text of all past State of the Union speeches at ThisNation.com. The images were then generated using Wordle and are all under a creative commons license.

For each images, I used the same settings so they could be compared more easily. I also went with an easy to read font, made all text horizontal and only used black text to make the comparisons easier. I could have made them a lot better looking with colors and different alignment of the text (look at some of the debate examples) but that would have made comparing each one more difficult.

I hope to do this for other presidents too. It would be interesting to see the evolution of the State of the Union from its beginnings with George Washington.

The things I notice most about these images are

1. President Bush uses the word "must" a lot in these speeches.
2. As everyone knows, the world changed after September 11th, 2001. This first address was in February 2001 so the 2002 address and later are post 9/11. 

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

What are your thoughts? I want to make a word cloud t-shirt now!

Pink and Blue and Yellow and Girls and Boys and Who Knows

I was closing some of the many open Firefox tabs I always leave open today and I found a cute site I saw last week again. It was the Pink and Blue Project.


I'll let the photographer, Jeongmee Yoon, explain it.

“The Pink and Blue Project” was at first motivated by my daughter. At five years old, she loves pink so much that she wants to wear only pink clothes and use only pink toys or objects.

I found that she is not unusual and most other little girls in the U.S. and South Korea love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon seems widespread among various ethnic groups regardless of their cultural background. It could be the result of an influence of customs or the power of pervasive commercial advertisements for merchandise such as Barbie and Hello Kitty.

While producing the “pink” images, I also became aware that many boys have a lot of blue possessions and started photographing them as well. Through advertising, consumers are directed to buy blue items, symbolizing strength and masculinity, for boys; and pink items, symbolizing sweetness and femininity, for girls.

More Pink and More Blue for you. But why is yellow "gender neutral"? Ah, and an interesting blog post on the history of the color/gender relationship.