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Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Analyse This: The Words of the Union




I'm a sucker for tools like this. The NY Times has a cool little state of the union word comparison tool to show visually the frequency and placement within the speech of Bush's carefully(?) chosen words over the years.

In their words:




We've done similar things for competitive reviews and industry speech analysis over the years... only without the speedy flash interface. Anyone know who provided the Flash app for this? Would be an interesting tool to have, but it looks like they did it in-house.

www.nytimes.com/ref/washington/20070123_STATEOFUNION.html

6 comments:

Adrian said...

Nelson found one on the web which he used for something. I asked for the link too but he's not responded. He's crabby today.

my name is meg. said...

you aren't even going to give me a little credit for this?!?! i may be in schweiz...but i'm still feeding you blog posts.

Anonymous said...

very cool - try typing in environment.

Adrian said...

meg who are you talking to, me or lachlan?

Lachlan said...

Me - She mailed the NYT story to me in the first place, but now she's blown my cover ;)

my name is meg. said...

can i get a..."bitchslap!"

for common knowledge...while i helplessly catch-up (7 hours later on American politics/state of the union address) - i do find useful links in the meantime. its all about catch and release over here. it's 20 CHF for a sunday times, and you can sell it off piece by piece when you are done if you hit the right cafe...

funny about this link though - it's something i've always attributed to the think-tanks and nutty-profs...we are seeing more and more of these interactive, quantifying tools released to the public. how many are interested and who...is the question. i believe this is evidence of the more engaged (abbreviated) public trying to make sense of rhetoric, etc that is a constant feed. How else do we cope? We've got to explain it somehow!?!

There was an interesting article in the NYT book review about norman mailer. in part, it refers today's popoluar "literature" (which i'm not disputing) being about "lifestyle trends, marketing techniques, cheap behavioral psychology and glib social-patterning-spotting..." and while the search for something true exists in the "fiction" (or glorified non-fictionl) novelistic sense, are we witnessing a divide or a collide between the two?