Obama’s inaugural speech was truly a masterpiece of presidential rhetoric. I would be surprised if it’s not studied by future generations. Even if the speech had been delivered by a drunken three-toed sloth it would have been powerful. Now perhaps you detect my cynicism. I sincerely hope we will actually see change, but given the basic nature of man to frak everything up…
Almost the instant the speech was done, visualizations were popping up all over the place. The LA Times threw together a Wordle, which was pretty and also highlighted the emotional thrust of the speech very well.
Wordle tag cloud of Obama's speech.
Soon after there was a Many Eyes word tree of the speech. If you haven’t played with word trees on Many Eyes, you’re missing out on some fun. I just heard how nerdy that was after I wrote it.
Many Eyes word tree of Obama's inaugural speech.
And then the NY Times put up tag clouds of every inaugural speech in the history of the US. Cool that they did it, but the tag clouds are ugly.
