Hello all! I hope that you are doing the best you can under these strangest of circumstances. After seeing all of the great digital projects that have been created and your posts on this blog, I present to you all…. my research paper. (sorry it’s not as fun) It uses Voyant Tools to do text analysis of some of the State of the Union addresses. I focus on three areas: which presidents were the most successful in their first address to the nation and to Congress? I also looked at Presidents Adams, McKinley, and Clinton’s first and second addresses. Why? They were in office at the turn of the century. Did their State of the Union speeches reflect on such a momentous occasion? Lastly, I compared the youngest and oldest presidents’ State of the Union speeches. I defined age at the start of their presidency. Teddy Roosevelt was 42 when he took office after the assassination of President McKinley and President Trump was 70 when he took office. (JFK was the youngest president elected: 43 years old, and President Reagan was 77 when he left office but only 69 when he took office. Those are thought to the traditional oldest and youngest presidents. I took a different approach). I could have looked at so many more aspects of the presidency. Voyant Tools was a great digital text analysis tool for this project. It made the research project feasible.
Stay safe out there!
Hi Jack, I very much enjoyed reading your paper. At this point you’ve got a solid structure in place and you provide some good context on the development and history of the State of the Union speeches over time.
It would be great to think about bringing in some visualizations as images into the paper. Along with that, I think there is a lot of potential to think about how you could use more of the text analysis tools in Voyant to drill into different aspects of the language used over time. The word counts are a good starting point, but it might be interesting to explore even some of the other basic tools in there, like reading level, or sentence length, etc.
Again, overall excited to see how the project is coming together.