Obama

Word cloud for Obama’s Trayvon Martin speech

Word cloud for Obama’s Trayvon Martin speech

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President Obama made a surprise speech earlier today about race in America in the wake of the Zimmerman trial. Content aside, let’s take a look at the speech’s stats:

It had 2,145 words and “think” was the most popular word, appearing 21 times (or comprising less than 1 percent of the speech). African” and “American” appear second and third (15 and 14 times, respectively).

Roughly 45 percent of the speech was made up of primary, or non-common, words, which tracks with the presidential habit of using lots of indefinite articles in his spoken comments.

Here’s the word cloud of the speech:

 

created at TagCrowd.com

Here’s the top-10 words frequency list (created at textfixer.com)

Primary Keywords Frequency
think 21
african 15
american 14
lot 12
more 10
out 10
people 9
those 8
state 8
going 7
community 7
trayvon 7
martin 7
very 7
local 7
want 7
it’s 6
better 6
issues 6
country 6
laws 6
see 5
case 5
folks 5
enforcement 5
fact 5
law 5
way 5

What the President’s environmental speech really said

What the President’s environmental speech really said

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Former Vice President Al Gore called President Obama’s speech on the environment last week “the best address on climate by any president ever.” 

That’s high praise. Obama’s speech won compliments from the left and groans from the right. It was, in a sense, predictable, though the ambition in the speech was atypical. But what did President Obama really say?

The word cloud gives a way to analyze what the President was saying by isolating the words from their context. It’s not a slam-dunk analysis tool, but it lets us see what the policy team thought was important enough to be repeated. If we were to compare them over time, we’d be able to create snapshots of priorities.

“Energy,” was mentioned 39 times. “Pollution,” 38 times.  “Carbon,” 37 times.  To put it into perspective, the President used each of those terms more than he said “America,” which is fairly stunning in a speech designed to set political policy.

created at TagCrowd.com