Snowclouds: inauguration speeches
Updated on 20 January 2009
Compare the inaugural addresses of new presidents Clinton, Kennedy, Reagan, Lincoln, Bush Snr and Bush Jnr at a glance with our interactive word clouds.
Each Snowcloud condenses a speech into one image: the bigger the word, the more often it was used.
Click the images below to generate full-screen Snowclouds of five past presidents' inauguration speeches.
Run the cursor over the words to see how often they appear.
Then click the word to find out how many times the president used it during the speech, and in what context.
George W Bush: 2001
Bill Clinton: 1993
George HW Bush: 1989
Ronald Reagan: 1981
John F Kennedy: 1961
Abraham Lincoln: 1861
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 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. We have also excluded "vice" and "president".
As well as any word with only one or two letters, those listed here are ignored by these Snowcloud (not all of the words in the list necessarily cropped up in each speech).
