by WonkoKevin

There’s a ton of buzz in the blogosphere and talk radio about Obama’s Wright/race speech this morning.  My read of the reaction so far is that for the anti-Obama audience, the speech was acknowledged as good but the response didn’t put the issue to bed.  For the pro-Obama audience, the speech was at least his best of the campaign, if not otherwise historical.

I used our text analysis technology (centering resonance analysis, as developed and sold by Crawdad Technologies) to analyze the speech.  The software uses natural language processing technology to create a network of the speech’s words.  By examining which words are most “central” in the network, or concept map, we can measure the word’s importance in the speech.  

One interesting thing I noted after processing the speech was that it was relatively low in focus, but still had some very strong themes.   Let me explain… a speech, or text, which is low in focus talks about a lot of things in a relatively disconnected way.  In a word, it’s conversational.  Imagine a couple data-dumping at dinner, or a TV sitcom.  A speech or text which is high in focus talks about a few things in a relatively connected way.  Imagine a legal or academic document, or an Al Gore speech.  At first glance it would seem that higher focus is better, and it often is, but not in politics.  Bush was much more conversational than Kerry and Gore and it made a positive difference.  In today’s speech, Obama’s overall focus came across as conversational, which increases its chances of resonating with the public, but it also had a number of related words which created a frame for the speech: black, white, man, American, race, racial, and story were the most important words in the speech.  Thus he was able to achieve focus in a conversational manner, not an easy rhetorical task.  Below is the concept map generated by our software.  The most important words are boxed in red; next in yellow.  Connections between the words indicate discursive connections made in the speech.  I’ll let you draw your own interpretation…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.