bmschmidt/sotu

This is a collection of web pages that visualize and explore State of the Union addresses over time. The README suggests it's part of research done with a collaborator on articles published in The Atlantic, examining patterns in presidential speeches. The project provides interactive HTML and JavaScript pages that let you browse through SOTU speeches, likely seeing how language and topics have changed across different presidencies and eras. The actual heavy lifting, parsing the speech texts and preparing the data, happens in a separate backend system (built with Python and Makefiles), but this repository contains the user-facing interface that lets people explore the results. The code is borrowed from the creator's larger Bookworm project (a text analysis tool), but stripped down to remove unnecessary complexity and focus just on what's needed for visualizing these speeches. This is a pragmatic choice: rather than carrying around a ton of unrelated code, they extracted just the relevant pieces. You'd use this if you're researching how presidential rhetoric has evolved, studying political communication, or just curious about what themes and language choices have dominated State of the Union addresses across American history. It's the kind of tool that lets you ask questions like "when did presidents start talking about the economy more?" or "how has the tone changed over the decades?" without needing to read hundreds of speeches yourself.