This section of the site is still in progress.
SOTU-db is a web-based tool to assess the "sentiment" of the texts of US Presidents' "State of the Union" addresses. You can learn more about sentiment analysis below. SOTU-db was created by Tyler Monaghan as a capstone project for Loyola University Chicago's Master of Arts in Digital Humanities program.
SOTU-db is a tool to assess the "sentiment" of texts. This primarily means determining whether the text is "positive" or "negative." In most cases, this is accomplished with a basic positive/negative "sentiment lexicon," or word list. The list contains thousands of words marked as "positive" (such as "good," "happy," "peace") and negative (such as "sad," "angry," "kill"). SOTU-db searches the SOTU texts for these words, and simply counts the number of positive matches subtracted by the number of negative matches to determine "sentiment." In some cases the computations are more complicated than this, but this is the underlying method for all anaylses on SOTU-db.
From the "SentimentAnalysis Vignette:"
Sentiment analysis is a research branch located at the heart of natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics and text mining. It refers to any measures by which subjective information is extracted from textual documents. In other words, it extracts the polarity of the expressed opinion in a range spanning from positive to negative. As a result, one may also refer to sentiment analysis as opinion mining (Pang and Lee 2008).
Insert info about texts here.
The US Constitution (Article 2, Section 3) mandates that the President of the United States "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." The US House's history website has an interesting page on the State of the Union's history; see also the excellent State of the Union section of The American Presidency Project by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at UC-Santa Barbara to learn more about the tradition of "State of the Union" addresses.
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