WEIGHTY WORDS
As expected, the State of the Union speech and the Democrats' rebuttal last night are dominating the discussion on Memeorandum this morning (Yes, I don't just read Techmeme).
Say what you like about the New York Times, but they can come up with a "Thriller" innovation online just like anybody else.
I'm talking about their cool "State of the Union" speech analyzer tool, that they put up on the site after President Bush's 2007 State of the Union speech (picture from the Washington Post)
The tool allows the user to search through the 34,000 odd words that President Bush has used cumulatively in his seven SOU speeches from 2001 to 2007, averaging out at around 5,000 words a speech.
It also provides a recent excerpt showing the context in which the word or phrase was used.
The NY Times has it's own article analyzing the speech with it's tool, that's well worth reading (Text and Audio transcript of the speech found here).
But I thought I'd give the tool a whirl myself.
Given that every word in an average SOU takes monumental effort by thousands of parties with innumerable layers of interest, over many months before a State of the Union speech, it's fascinating to see how different words fared over time.
For example, Paul Kedrosky punched in the word God, and had this to report:
"Other than a paraphrased quote about Dikembe Mutombo, the word "God" doesn't appear in the 2007 State of the Union speech. In every other Bush-delivered State of the Union speech, dating back to 2001, Bush has always closed the speech with some variant on "May God bless America", but that ending phraseology didn't make the cut this year.
(As an aside, the most God-filled SoU speech was in 2003, when the Big Guy showed up 4 times, three of them in a closing flurry.)"
I checked out the same word, and got the results 1, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 2 for the years 2001 through 2007. It seemed that 2003 was the anomaly in that data series.
Moving on to the word "Terror", one gets the results as: 1, 34, 21, 20, 27, 20 and 22 for last night. Pretty consistent since 9/11.
Given that fear is the bane of politics, I next tried the word "Security". which yielded 15, 19, 10, 8, 29, 9 and 10 last night. It's use 29 times in 2005 is understandable, given the upcoming 2006 mid-term elections.
Similarly, "Border", which is an on-going obsession with CNN's "Broken Borders" Lou Dobbs, comes in at 0, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4 and no less than 7 times last night.
On the other hand, "Immigration", one of the founding drivers of this great country, yields 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, and 4 last night.
Hopefully, the extra two mentions last night will yield positive dividends working with the Democrats in 2007. (Immigration is a hot button issue for me as long-time readers may know. My previous posts on the subject can be found here, here and here).
Next, I tried the word "Environment", which underlies the main theme of the 2007 Davos gathering in Switzerland this week: "Shaping the Global Agenda: The Shifting Power Equation". As expected, it comes up in the following series: 3, 1, 4, 0, 1, 1, 3.
"Climate" on the other hand, shows up only once, last night, the first time the President addressed the issue of global climate change.
Sometimes what's notable is not just what's there, but what isn't there.
It truly surprised me that the word "Globalization" doesn't appear in any of the seven SOUs. Just to be sure, I spelled it as "Globalisation", the British way, to be safe, but no cigar. The word "Trade", though does make it in the following series: 4, 4, 0, 2, 0, 3, and 1, so that's a small blessing. However, "World Trade" only makes it once in 2004, but only in the context of the first, 1993 attack on the "World Trade Center" . Hank Paulson, please note!
The two other words that often seem the bane of my daily existence are "Internet" and the "Web", 2.0 or otherwise. They also happen to be the drivers of so much change in the national and global economies.
Neither word makes in the the State of the Union speeches in any of the seven years.
Oh well, I guess I can take comfort from the fact that the word "Technology" fared far better, coming in with 1, 3, 2, 1, 2, 4 and 4 last night.
The President mentioned technology as one of the several blessings enjoyed by the nation.
In particular, he cited "TECHNOLOGY that is revolutionizing the world".
I'm glad they noticed.
I'd urge you to try the New York Times SOU analyzer. Would love to see what else you find.
On a broader note, wouldn't it be cool if one could analyze ALL political speeches this way? Maybe even ALL SPEECHES by bigwigs given over a period of time?
P.S.:
For more fun with the tool, check out this post by "The Web of Language", titled "Semantic State of the Union". I particularly liked how they used the NY Times SOU analyzer:
"Comparing key words from this year’s speech and last gives us a kind of Dow Jones average of the semantic state of the union. Here are some of the most active words in tonight’s trading: energy 3, down 5, though oil, at 9, was up 6 from 2006, which is certainly good news for Mr. Bush’s backers in Texas and Saudi Arabia.
Overall, though, the economy, at 7, was down 2, and education, at zero, also closed down 2. Science rated a single mention, compared with 7 last year, for a net loss of 6. Climate change did make its debut, but in keeping with the decline in science, warming was nowhere to be heard. But abandoning science -- it's only theories, after all -- doesn’t mean the president has put his trust in God (at 2, unchanged from last year), since faith, with only 2 mentions, showed a 50% decline."
The full post is worth a read.
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