Barack Obama has been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States! The Web is abuzz with energy ad hope. Below is a tag cloud of Obama's inauguration speech. Let's hope that this positive energy transfers into our own community and spurs libraries on to do better things, build better collections, and better serve our readers.

(Update 7PM PST: I updated the tag cloud without the term "applause." Thanks for the commenter who pointed that out. JRJ)

It was a moving victory speech from PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA! On this night, in this town, there are parties in the street, cars honking, a feeling like 11:59 on New Year's eve. Below is the tag cloud of President Obama's speech, courtesy of tag crowd. For those that weren't able to tune in, here's audio of his speech. Now the real work begins!

Last week I posted a tag cloud of Barack Obama's speech accepting the Presidential candidacy of the Democratic party. Today is John McCain's turn. I got the transcript at zimbio, the same site I used to get the Obama speech. Tag Crowd was again used to analyze the transcript. Enjoy!

We've played around before with tag cloud word analysis (using a tool called Tag Crowd), so I thought I'd do a cloud for Barack Obama's convention speech on thursday night. I'll post another cloud for John McCain's speech on Thursday.

Some of you may remember that we've been interested in visualization tools like tag cloud generating services (i.e., Tag Crowd). We haven't done one of these for a while, but watching tonight's State of the Union address, I thought it'd be interesting to visualize that text (courtesy of the NY Times). Let us know what you think.

Although this is not, strictly speaking, government information, it is about the presidential race and is an interesting complement to US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud (more on that here: remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud).

This is another good demonstration of how interesting things can be done with information that is easily re-usable.

• Tag Clouds for the Democratic Debate, Pollster.com, April 27, 2007

As a contrast, one can not remix documents like SUPERINTENDENT OF DOCUMENTS POLICY STATEMENT 301, because it is an image of text, not text.

As we reported the other day (Remixes, Mashups in the news) there are several sites that have online tools for visualizing word use in the State of the Union speeches. Here are two more, one by Jason Giffey who is a librarian at University of Tennessee - Chattanooga.

• State of the Union Project by Brad Borevitz at onetwothree.net
• Tag Cloud for 2007 State of the Union, by Jason Griffey, Pattern Recognition (January 24th, 2007)

Building on James R's post, I ran two major GPO/Council documents through Tag Crowd:

• “Knowledge Will Forever Govern”: A VISION STATEMENT FOR FEDERAL DEPOSITORY LIBRARIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY - Published by the Depository Library Council
• A Strategic Vision for the 21st Century - published by GPO management.

The difference in tag clouds is both striking and disturbing:

Knowledge will forever govern

Note that out of these 50 tags, four of the largest are: Government Information Public Library. Readers of FGI will know we like this outcome. It shows that Council was at least partly listening to the user community when they drafted the final version of the vision paper.

Contrast that tag cloud with the one for Strategic Vision for the 21st Century:

Note that out of the 50 tags shown her, five of the largest are: Government Digital Documents GPO Business. Library is barely detectable, but at least it is larger than the tag for "public", at least in my view.

The Strategic Plan is the document that GPO brought to Congress as the vision of the GPO Management. TagCrowd's admitted simple visualization analysis appears to show that the Strategic Plan is very far away from the vision of the documents community. This should worry us. Or at least lead to a discussion of visualization tools!

Building on Jim's post on tag clouds, this certainly is a great way to analyze a document. And here's a tool that could allow us to, as Daniel points out in his comment, analyze the zeitgeist of an entire administration. Check out TagCrowd. Paste in some text (or upload a text file of up to 100KB), press a button, and you can instantly visualize word frequency! I tried it with the transcript for President Bush's remarks at the signing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (aka the US torture bill or the death of Habeas Corpus) and here's the tag cloud I got. Interestingly, the most common tags wrote the following sentence:

"American attacks bill; CIA commissions intelligence military program questioning terrorists war." (punctuation added!)

US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud by Chirag Mehta, 2 Nov. 2006.

An interesting remix of public documents! Mehta got more than 360 speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 and created a "tag cloud" much like you see on del.icio.us (and like our own del.icio.us tag cloud in the left-hand side-bar of this page).

On Mehta's site, larger font size indicates more use of the word and different colors indicate newer and older use. There is a slider-control at the top of the page that allows you to view the clouds for each document.

As we often mention, such re-use of public information should be an explicit goal of government information policy.

Interestingly, Mehta got the documents from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com, not from government sources directly.