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SOTU language analysis reveals history’s ‘twists and turns’

President Barack Obama

Assistant Professor of History Ben Schmidt ana­lyzed the lan­guage of Obama’s pres­i­den­tial address—and that of every SOTU speech dating back to 1790—using Book­worm, a simple and pow­erful way to visu­alize trends in dig­i­tized texts.

 

Luck,” “lows,” and “Les­bian.” “Dodge,” “dusted,” and “drowning.” “Tesla,” “eBay,” and “Instagram.”

Ben Schmidt was up late Tuesday night, tweeting out these and more than 70 other words that had never appeared in a State of the Union address until Pres­i­dent Barack Obama deliv­ered his annual report to Con­gress that evening.

Some of the words were sur­prising, but many others were tac­tical and say some­thing impor­tant about the state of Amer­ican society today,” said Schmidt, an assis­tant pro­fessor of his­tory and a core fac­ulty member in the NU Lab for Texts, Maps, and Net­works, Northeastern’s center for dig­ital human­i­ties and com­pu­ta­tional social science.

Schmidt ana­lyzed the lan­guage of Obama’s pres­i­den­tial address—and that of every SOTU speech dating back to 1790—using Book­worm, a simple and pow­erful way to visu­alize trends in dig­i­tized texts. He and a Har­vard col­league cre­ated the plat­form for text analysis in 2011, and have since used it to examine the lan­guage used in every­thing from news­paper arti­cles to more than 500 episodes of The Simp­sons.

Schmidt’s latest project was made pos­sible in part by a grant from the National Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, which enabled him to enhance his Book­worm tool through col­lab­o­ra­tion with the HathiTrust Dig­ital Library, which holds 3.9 bil­lion pages of dig­i­tized materials.

He dis­cussed the project in an inter­ac­tive article in The Atlantic, for which he used Book­worm to comb through all 224 State of the Union addresses and rank the fre­quency with which each pres­i­dent used each word. In an inter­ac­tive com­panion piece, he and Mitch Fraas of the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­vania used nat­ural lan­guage pro­cessing algo­rithms to iden­tify more than 16,000 men­tions of 1,410 dif­ferent places that pres­i­dents have ref­er­enced since the very first State of the Union more than 200 years ago. For­eign policy his­to­rians including Gretchen Heefner, an assis­tant pro­fessor of his­tory at North­eastern, pro­vided his­tor­ical con­text, explaining how the speeches reflect America’s changing role in the world.

The find­ings, Schmidt wrote in The Atlantic, “reveal how the words pres­i­dents use reflect the twists and turns of Amer­ican history.”

The word “freedom,” he said, was used spar­ingly until Franklin D. Roo­sevelt placed the “Four Free­doms” at the center of his 1941 address. Since then, the word has gained pop­u­larity, par­tic­u­larly among Repub­lican pres­i­dents. George W. Bush, for example, said “freedom” more than 70 times, while Obama has used the word fewer than 10 times, including once Tuesday night.

Like “freedom,” “col­lege” fea­tures an unmis­tak­able par­tisan tilt. Demo­c­ratic pres­i­dents, such as Obama, Bill Clinton, and John F. Kennedy, have used the word far more than Repub­lican pres­i­dents, such as Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford. Bush, for example, said “col­lege” five times, while Obama has used the word on more than 50 occa­sions, including 12 times last night.

His speech on Tuesday evening also included the use of sev­eral words that had not been spoken at a State of the Union in more than 100 years. According to Schmidt, Obama said “vaca­tions” for the first time since Mil­lard Fill­more used the word in 1851 and uttered “mas­terful” for the first time since Theodore Roosevelt’s 1901 address.

Mean­while, his ref­er­ences to China (three) and the Middle East (two) dove­tailed with the rhetor­ical choices of recent pres­i­dents, whose lan­guage has reflected their interest in par­tic­ular coun­tries and regions. According to Schmidt and Heefner’s account in The Atlantic, the Middle East became a fix­ture of pres­i­den­tial addresses fol­lowing the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, while China—whose “men­tions in the State of the Union follow the sine wave of Amer­ican interest”— once again became a fre­quent topic of pres­i­den­tial address fol­lowing Nixon’s 1972 visit.

In many ways, the places Obama men­tioned con­tinued the trend of the past few decades,” Schmidt explained. “His speech focused on a band of coun­tries in the Middle East, while there was little dis­cus­sion of Africa, which has been char­ac­ter­istic of pres­i­den­tial address in gen­eral and Obama’s in particular.”

-By Jason Kornwitz

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