The Atlantic in 2015 wrote a series of posts about The Language of the State of the Union, both the literal words and the places that were referenced. Using modern Bookworm they were able to create webpages that, using the analyzed data of each State of the Union address, showed the most used words and when they were said. Bookworm is a tool “that visualizes Bookworm is a simple and powerful way “to visualize trends in repositories of digitized texts.” and since the link in the Atlantic article is broken we can use the Wayback Machine to go back and look at the Bookworm tool and the other things they have done with the tool.
The Language of the State of the Union
The Language of the State of the Union article displayed their data in a bar graph with keywords that the authors chose to show. In the screenshot above I chose the word “slavery” as an example which has a concentration with James Buchannan and Abraham Lincoln using the word the most, respectively. Which makes sense as these were the president before (Buchannan) and during (Lincoln) the Civil War, a war over Slavery.
You can also visualize the data in order of who used the word the most to least. Using the word “God” you can see that most of the early presidents did not use the word, presumably to keep up with the idea of the separation of Church and State. The president who used it the most was president Ronald Reagan who built a base of Evangelical Christians.
The State of the Union in Context
Benjamin Schmidt, one of the authors of the articles, created a page on his website titles The State of the Union in Context. On this site you are able to click on the different words from a transcript of different addresses and see the usage of that word. However, possibly due to my browser settings or due to modern browser technologies this tool does not show me the graph the way it is supposed to.
The Mapping of the State of the Union
Like the Language of the State of the Union they took each speech or letter and for each year whenever a place is mentioned it is put onto a map of the world. The larger the circle, the more the place was mentioned! One downside to this version is they did not include who was the president for that year. So, if you are not an expert who knows the chronological order of the presidency than you will probably have to look up who was president in, for example, 1853.
In the article they use 1898 as an example and the context as to why there is so much talk about so many different places around the globe is the War with Spain in 1989. The United States gained the territories of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Cuba was also a part of the war where we helped them gain independence from Spain, which is why it is talked about so much as well.
The Authors
The authors Benjamin Schmidt and Mitch Fraas are both historians that specialize in digital technologies. Benjamin has “worked with and led digital humanities groups deploying new approaches to thinking about the past through data analysis and data visualization.” and Mitch is “currently a principal investigator on a multi-institutional project to digitize over 500 manuscripts from the Islamicate world held in Philadelphia and New York libraries.” Making them a great team of authors to help create a set of articles regarding the digital analysis of all the State of the Union addresses.