Snowcloud: Obama inauguration speech
Updated on 20 January 2009
Barack Obama's first presidential address at a glance as an interactive video word cloud - click a word to see a video clip of it being used in the speech.
The Snowcloud condenses Obama's inauguration speech into one image: the bigger the word, the more often it was used.
Click the image below to generate a full-screen video Snowcloud. Run the cursor over the words to see where how often they appear in the speech.
Then click the word to see it in context in both a written transcript and a video of the speech.
About Snowclouds
Snowclouds are a Flash application designed by Channel 4 News's senior programme director, Martin Collett.
These interactive word clouds condense the text of a speech into one handy, interactive image.
The more frequently a word is used during a speech, the bigger it is displayed. Clicking on the word brings up the transcript and video of the speech and shows the contexts in which the word was used.
The Snowcloud generator ignores common words such as "and", "the" and "there" to get a clearer picture of the distinct content of the speech.
As well as any word with only one or two letters, those listed here are ignored by the Snowcloud (not all of the words in the list necessarily cropped up in the speech).
