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How to Navigate the Interface To move between State of the Union addresses, click or drag on the graph below the word cloud; the president who delivered each address and the date of delivery will appear at the bottom of the screen and in the center. The current date will appear in white and the previous one in red. You can also use the right and left arrow keys to move one year at a time. The words from the previous address viewed will appear in red when your mouse is over the cloud window so you can compare them. Mouse out to make them fade into the background. Click on a word to view the full State of the Union address in the window to the right; the selected word will be highlighted. Click below the graph or on a blank area of the word cloud to view the Wikipedia U.S. History Timeline describing events that happened in and around the year of the address. Words automagically move to avoid overlapping. On mouseover, a line and dot indicate the original position (according to the data). To make the words move more, press the up arrow. Use the search box to mine all the State of the Union addresses for occurrences of specific words (use quotes to search for phrases such as “United States”). Icons below the Timeline indicate the distribution of the address: Spoken: the text was delivered orally.

Written: the text was delivered as a written document.

Day: the text was broadcast during the day.

Night: the text was broadcast in the evening.

Radio: the text was broadcast live on the radio.

TV: the text was broadcast live on television.

Web: the text was distributed on the internet. Mouse over individual words to get more data on the word: Frequency in text the number of times the word appears in this address. Per 10k in text at the current frequency, how many times the word would occur per ten thousand words. Per 10k in corpus at the average frequency of the word in all addresses, how many times the word would occur per ten thousand words. Document frequency the number of documents that the word appears in (out of 217 as of 2007). Relative frequency is a measure of how unique the usage of the word is on a scale of 100; if one president uses a word often, that other presidents do not use so often, it is likely to be important. Average position if 0 is the first word and 100 the last; low numbers mean the word tends to come at the beginning, high numbers the end (numbers near 50 could mean the middle or even distribution). [View instructions]

Email this page to a friend or State of the Union: February 4, 2020 President Trump will deliver his address to a joint session of congress on February 4, 2020 (9pm EST). Have access to the analysis as soon as its ready by signing up for the announcement email. Use this form. You can make your own word to word comparisons of usage over time with the SotuGraph tool.