Congressional Address Sentence Bars

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009

Obama delivered an Address to the Joint Session of Congress last night. I have compared it below to the last couple of State of the Union Addresses using the Sentence Bars technique. It clearly shows a shift away from Security issues towards Economic and Domestic issues. The summary pie charts at the bottom make it even more obvious - Security fell from around 40% in 2007 and 2008 to 13% this year. Vocabulary associated with the Economy was about 20% in 2007 and 2008 and 40% this year. References to Domestic issues have also increased dramatically this year.

This previous post shows diagrams for 2001 and 2002 as well. The 2001 version, which was prior to 9/11, shows a vocabulary profile almost identical to the one this year - Government 21%, Domestic 29%, Economy 38%, and Security 13%.

Address to Congress - Sentence Bars with Topic Colours (click to see larger version)

 


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