CivicActions

I am always fascinated by new visual ways of looking at old things, ways which reveal truth and meaning and intent previously hidden but secretly suspected. Take the example of the annual State of the Union speech, no doubt one of the most artificial and deliberately, if not cynically, constructed examples of speech of any kind, nestled as the crown jewel in the crown of synthetic political diatribe. Since the goal of modern political speech is such a game of obfuscation and misdirection, better tools to deconstruct the game to reveal the true intent and meaning of the gamers are the tools of true democracy.

So I was thrilled to run across these two clever mashups. The first, Style.org's "The State of the Union Parsing Tool" allows the user to view a wordmap of George W. Bush's last six addresses to Congress by examining the position and frequency of word pairs in the text. Then you can compare these to select historical addresses. I have chosen "Freedom" and "Terror" as my examples, but anything is possible.

Even more clever and wide-ranging is Brad Borevitz' State of the Union "TimeCloud" (a tag cloud mashed with a timeline) which displays word frequencies and collective relevance of the most common words in all State of the Union addresses since George Washington's first, and briefest example. In this excellent tool you find word importance, word frequency, education level of the speeches, and automatic highlighting of the selected words in context. Read the excellent essay The {Sorry} State We Are In to gather the intent of this tool to reveal the agregious decline in public debate and political ideas in favor of Orwellian doublespeak.

I say that CivicActions must embrace and expand upon tools like this until we can deliver TruthRays to voters and enable them to find truth and meaning behind these otherwise impenetrable facades.