Every year, the President of the United States delivers a “State of the Union” message to the U.S. Congress. These texts express global shifts and changing political moods. The data for this visualization was harvested with a tool created by SoSo Ltd for a workshop at MICA, in February of 2016.

This chart examines frequently used words from each year’s state of the union address. The transcripts are given a word count, parsing out common speech words such as: the, and, if, etc. The words are listed in order from the first most frequently used word down to the tenth most frequently used.

On viewing the remnants from each State of the Union address, not only are the words: new, more, and now repeatedly found, but a visible trend in how frequently and how prominently they appeared within the top ten words for the State of the Union address each year begins to manifest itself.