Aging Tag Cloud of U.S. Presidential Speeches
January 19th, 2007
This is one of the more interesting uses of javascript I’ve seen to date: a tag cloud generated from presidential speeches from the late 18th century to President Bush’s 2006 State of the Union. Below the cloud is a slider so that as you drag from left to right (i.e., from past to present), the cloud particles change — the big difference I noticed immediately was how the emphasis on “constitution” was gradually replaced with an emphasis on “economy” or “economics”. I don’t think there are any conclusions to draw from this, but the project itself is thought-provoking.
This app is cleverly called a Tagline, and the sourcecode (PHP, hurray!) is freely available.
via O’Reilly Radar