Take a look at some Historic American Rhetoric
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 7:40PM 
Hey just a quick note, finally finished the “Words of the Inaugural Address Gallery” for those of you who are unaware of what it’s all about here is a brief overview. To go to the gallery click here!
What is it? It’s a gallery of all 56 American presidential inaugural addresses, not only is there the full transcripts for each of the addresses there is a word cloud visualization to go along with each address. (There is also video footage where available; if it’s not there it will be soon)
What’s Word Cloud? A word cloud is a colourful arty way to look at speeches, or any type of text when you think about it. The word clouds displays frequently used word in a given (excludes word of common usage e.g. the, a, at). The bigger the word in the word cloud the more frequently it appears in the text therefore it gives it more prominence in the image. To create the images in this gallery I used a cool little web application called Wordle.
Why should you take a look at the gallery? It gives you a new perspective of looking at some historic American rhetoric. To go to the gallery click here!
Reader Comments (12)
Well done, it looks great!!!
great resource. Thanks
Great resource - I sharing it with others. Thanks for the tweet!
Beautifully done. What a great idea. When someone suggested I do a complex Wordle covering a number of realated works, this elegant solution never even dawned on me. This is wonderful!
Appreciate all your hard work. Great resource.
Wow! What a great resource, You do such neat/useful things with wordles! Thanks for sharing!!
Really interesting!
excellent. really love this. check out my blog to see song lyrics in wordle www.whatdoesthatsongmean.blogspot.com
Nice work, looks great.
Have you seen this site? http://chir.ag/projects/preztags/ It takes a largely automated approach to analysing the tagged structure of the last couple hundred years of presidential speeches. Make sure you move the slider about the tag cloud to see the effect. And take some time to read how it was made... it's rather fascinating!
Chris
Hello
This is a really nice application of Wordle to enliven a potentially dry subject (sorry, not being American I would see presidential addresses as not exactly being among teenagers' favourite reading materials :-). I could also see how Wordle clouds could be used to introduce the potentially even drier topic of concordances and content analysis on research methods modules. Thanks for sharing this.
Best
Florence
Looks really great and wonderful... Good job!
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ParaSlim
Wow, very hard worl guys, really nice to see that!!!
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