Jeffrey McManus

This is an amazing textual analysis tool by the NY Times that crunches the State of the Union addresses given by the current president. It shows frequency of word usage and lets you pick words and compare them to see how frequently he uses them. It would be neat to apply this tool to the speeches of prior presidents (i.e., those who suck less), but it’s still fun to see what #43 talks about — or what he doesn’t talk about.

Number of mentions of the word "internet"? Zero. That’s probably for the best. Mentions of "computer"? Just once in six years (in the context of computerizing health care records).

Number of times he mentioned the word "deficit"? Once and only once per year, every year (until this year when he mentions it three times). It’s almost like he’s saying to the Democrats, "This stinky deficit I’ve run up over the past six years? I’ve handed it off to you, suckos, now deal with it. Enjoy!"

Textual analysis of this kind is dear to my heart; in college I worked for a professor of German literature running books like Siddhartha through an optical scanner so he could apply database juju to the text and create tools like this, and when I decided to do a similar project on my own for my senior honors project it was my first serious attempt at database programming.

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