State of the Union interactives

Posted on January 24, 2007 by Melissa Worden

I found two samples of using word clouds with President Bush’s State of the Union address.

MSNBC.com’s State of the Union: Interactive analysis is, well, quite fun to use.

Watch the speech in its entirety and/or pieces, and see the word clouds change to reflect which words Bush uses most. And yup, you can skip ahead if you don’t want to sit through the whole video.

Another feature I like: Click on a section, and you can comment on that section right in the same screen.

The New York Times created a similar interactive, State of the Union in Words that while it isn’t as fun, it gives some more text-based detail to compare the context of the words used over the years.

It also has a nifty search box so you can search ANY word you’d like and see how that compares to the years past, too.

Interestingly, he used the word “war” 58 times and the word “peace” 49. He hasn’t mentioned “September 11th” since 2004. He’s discussed “Iran” recently, but he hasn’t brought up “North Korea” since 2003.