Obama Speech Comparison
By: Jeff Clark Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008
There is a lot of interest today in the speech delivered last night by Barack Obama where he accepted the Democratic Party nomination as their candidate. I'll leave the political analysis to others more qualified than I but I thought it might be interesting to have a look at it through the lense of some of my text analysis tools. I've decided to compare it with the 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address delivered by Obama.
To start with, here are two StreamGraph diagrams for both speeches. Click on either one to see more detail.
Next is a Document Contrast Diagram
Contrast Diagram for Obama DNC 2004 and 2008 (click to see larger version)
And finally is an interactive Document Cloud Comparison of the two speeches. See this older post on Document Cloud Comparisons for a discussion of how it works. Here are a few interesting tidbits that I stumbled across with this tool:
- Obama did not use the words 'black' or 'white' in his acceptance speech last night
- The most common non-trivial word used last night was 'promise'
- The word 'hope' was used much more often in the 2004 speech
This tool requires Java and may take a few seconds to start up.
The interactive application: