What a week it’s been. Martin Luther King Day followed immediately by the swearing in of a pathbreaking President of the United States. I would like to write at length about the tide of hope that President Obama’s measured words, and deliberative actions leading up to and following the inauguration, have set in motion. But for now, I will only pass on this clever and aesthetically pleasing graphical analysis of his inauguration speech, based on this cool software and taken from here. Basically, it simply goes through a text and plots each word therein (excluding “the”, “and”, and the like, evidently) with its size proportional to the number of times it appears in the text. Essentially like the tag clouds you see associated with blogs or Technorati, etc. So here, my fellow Americans, is the analysis of President Obama’s inauguration speech:
In comparison, here is the analysis of President Bush’s second inaugural speech in January 2005:
The inaugural speeches of Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Lincoln can be found here. I will leave it to the pundits (for now at last) to make the detailed comparisons. Naturally, I was intrigued by the idea of trying this out myself. So just for grins, I cranked the Natural Patriot’s first post through the grinder and here is what it produced:
Not terribly surprising given that the first post was essentially a definition. And here is the analysis of my own reflection on the upcoming Obama inauguration:
Lots of opportunities for fun and mischief here . . .
We remain a young nation, but in the words of scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit, to choose our better history.