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Text of the page (random words):
as the sixteenth century and was well accepted during the nineteenth century contraction generally is also well attested in nineteenth century texts see this post at language log however both today and in the nineteenth century prescriptive standards dictate that contractions are to be avoided in formal writing a norm which sairio 2010 has traced to swift and addison in the early 1700s thus if not the written medium directly then the cultural standards for the written medium have motivated presidents to avoid contraction when working in that medium presidents ignore this arbitrary standard as soon as they find themselves speaking before the public the conclusion to be drawn from these results should have been obvious from the beginning the differences between oral and written states of the union are pretty clearly a function of a president s willingness or unwillingness to break the wall between himself and his audience that wall is frequently broken in oral speeches to the public but rarely broken in written addresses to congress as seen above plural reference we us and direct audience address you your are favored rhetorical devices in oral states of the union but less used in the written documents the importance underlying this difference is that both features plural reference and direct audience address are deliberate disruptions of the ceremonial distance that exists between president and audience during a formal address this disruption in my view can be observed most explicitly in the use of the pronouns we and us the oral medium motivates presidents to construct with the use of these first person plurals an intimate identification between themselves and their audience plurality a professed american value is encoded grammatically with the use of plural pronouns president and audience are different and many but are referenced in oral speeches as one unit existing in the same subjective space also facilitating a decrease in ceremonial distance as seen above is the use of second person you at much higher rates in oral than in written states of the union i would suggest that the oral medium motivates presidents to call direct attention to the audience and its role in shaping the state of the nation in other cases second person pronouns may represent an invitation to the audience to share in the president s experiences contraction is a secondary feature of the oral medium s attempt at audience identification if a president s goal is to build identification with american citizens and to shorten the ceremonial distance between himself and them then clearly no president will adopt a formal diction that eschews contraction contraction either negative or subject verb is the informality marker par excellence non contraction on the other hand though it may sound normal in writing sounds stilted and excessively proper in speech the amusing effect of this style of diction can be witnessed in the film true grit in a nation comprised of working and middle class individuals this excessively proper diction would work against the goals of shortening ceremonial distance and constructing identification many scholars have noted ronald reagan s use of contraction to affect a conversational tone in his states of the union but contraction appears as an informality marker across multiple oral speeches in the sotu corpus in contrast when a president s address takes the form of a written document maintaining ceremonial distance seems to be the general tactic as presidents follow correct written standards and avoid contractions the president does not go out of his way to construct identification with his audience congress through informal diction instead the goal of the written medium is to report the details of the state of the nation in a professional distant manner what i think these results indicate is that the state of the union s primary audience changes from medium to medium this fact is signaled even by the salutations in the sotu corpus the majority of oral addresses delivered via radio or television are explicitly addressed to fellow citizens or some other term denoting the american public in written addresses to congress however the salutation is almost always limited to members of the house and the senate two lexical effects of this shift in audience are pronoun choice and the use or avoidance of contraction we us you the frequency of these pronouns drops by fifty percent or more when presidents move from the oral to the written medium from an address to the public to an address to congress the same can be said for contraction presidents it seems feel less need to construct identification through these informality markers through plural and second person reference when their audience is congress alone in contrast audience identification becomes an exigent goal when the citizenry takes part in the state of the union address to put the argument another way the sotu s change in medium has historically occurred alongside a change in genre participants these intimately linked changes motivate different rhetorical choices does a president choose or not choose to construct a plural identification between himself and his audience we us or to call attention to the audience s role you in shaping the state of the nation does a president choose or not choose to use obvious informality markers i e contraction the answer depends on medium and on the participants reached via that medium congress or the american people tomorrow i ll post results from two 30 run topic models of the written oral sotu corpora posted in rhetoric technology writing and semiotics leave a comment january 19 2016 by seth long an attempt at quantifying changes to genre medium rule et al s 2015 article on the state of the union makes the rather bold claim for literary and rhetorical scholars that changes to the sotu s medium of delivery has had no effect on the form of the address measured as co occurring word clusters as well as cosine similarity across diachronic document pairs i ve just finished an article muddying their results a bit so here s the initial data dump i ll do it in a series of posts full argument to follow if i can muster enough energy in the coming days to convert an overly complicated argument into a few paragraphs first cosine similarity essentially rule et al calculate the cosine similarity between each set of two sotu addresses chronologically 1790 and 1791 1790 and 1792 1790 and 1793 and so on until each address has been compared to all other addresses they discover high similarity measurements nearer to 1 across most of the document space prior to 1917 and lower similarity measurements nearer to 0 afterward which they interpret as a shift between premodern and modern eras of political discourse they visualize these measurements in the transition matrices which look like heat maps in figure 2 of their article adapting a python script written by dennis muhlestein i calculated the cosine similarity of states of the union delivered in both oral and written form in the same year this occurred in 8 years a total of 16 texts fdr in 1945 eisenhower in 1956 and nixon in 1973 delivered written messages to congress as well as public radio addresses summarizing the written messages nixon in 1972 and 1974 and carter in 1978 1980 delivered both written messages and televised speeches these 8 textual pairs provide a rare opportunity to analyze the same annual address delivered in two mediums making them particularly appropriate objects of analysis the texts were cleaned of stopwords and stemmed using the porter stemming algorithm cosine similarity of oral written sotu pairs the results are graphed above not a lot of numbers so there s no point turning them into a color shaded matrix as rule et al do the cosine similarity measurements range from 0 67 a higher similarity to 0 40 a lower similarity the cosine similarity measurement of all written and all oral sotu texts copied chronologically into two master txt files is 0 55 remarkably close to the average of the 8 pairs measured independently there is much ambiguity in these measurements on one hand they can be interpreted to suggest that rule et al overlooked differences between oral and written states of the union the measurements invite a deeper analysis of the corpus on the other hand the measurements also tell us not to expect substantial variation in the article to take a quick stab at summarizing my argument i suggest that this metric among others reflects a genre whose stability is challenged but not undermined by changes to medium as well as parallel changes initiated by the medial alteration but you re probably wondering what this cosine similarity business is all about without going into too much detail vector space models that s what this method is called can be simplified with the following intuitive example let s say we want to compare the following texts text 1 mary hates dogs and cats text 2 mary loves birds and cows one way to quantify the similarity between the texts is to turn their words into matrices with each row representing one of the texts and each column representing every word that appears in either of the texts typically when constructing a vector space model stop words are removed and remaining words are stemmed so the complete word list representing texts 1 and 2 would look like this 1 mary 2 hate 3 love 4 dog 5 cat 6 bird 7 cow each text however contains only some of these words we represent this fact in each text s matrix each word from the complete word list that appears in a text is represented as a 1 in the matrix each word that does not appear in a text is represented as a 0 in most analyses frequency scores are used such as relative frequency or tf idf keeping things simple however the matrices for texts 1 and 2 would look like this text 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 text 2 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 now that we have two matrices it is a straightforward mathematical operation to treat these matrices as vectors in euclidean space and calculate the vectors cosine similarity with the euclidean dot product formula which returns a similarity metric between 0 and 1 for more info check out this great blog series and here s a handy cosine similarity calculator the cosine similarity of the matrices of text 1 and text 2 is 0 25 we could say that the texts are 25 similar this number makes intuitive sense because we ve removed the stopword and from both texts each text is comprised of four words with one word shared between them text 1 mary hates dogs cats text 2 mary loves birds cows thus resulting in the 0 25 measurement obviously when the texts being compared are thousands of words long it becomes impossible to do the math intuitively which is why vector space modeling is a valuable tool next length rule et al use tf idf scores and thus norm their algorithms to document length as a result their study fails to take into account differences in sotu length however the most obvious effect of medium on the state of the union has been a change in raw word count the average length of all written addresses is 11 057 words the average length of all oral speeches is 4 818 words below i visualize the trend diachronically as a rule written states of the union are longer than oral states of the union state of the union word counts by year and medium the correlation between medium and length is most obvious in the early twentieth century in 1913 woodrow wilson broke tradition and delivered an oral state of the union the corresponding drop in word count is immediate and obvious however the effect is not as immediate at other points in the sotu s history for example although wilson began the oral tradition in 1913 both coolidge and hoover returned to the written medium from 1924 1932 wilson s last two speeches in 1919 and 1920 were also delivered as written messages nevertheless these written addresses do not correspond with a sudden rebound in sotu length none of the early twentieth century written addresses is terribly lengthy with an average near 5 000 the initial shift in 1801 from oral to written addresses also fails to correspond with an obvious and immediate change in word count the original states of the union were delivered orally and these early documents are by far the shortest however when thomas jefferson began the written tradition in 1801 sotu length took several decades to increase to the written mean despite these caveats the trend remains strong the oral medium demands a shorter state of the union while the written medium tends to produce lengthier documents to date the longest address remains carter s 1981 written message more later needless to say i believe there are formal differences in the sotu corpus 2 million words that seem to correlate with medium however as i ll show in a post tomorrow they re rather granular and were bound to be overlooked by rule et al s broad stroke approach posted in rhetoric technology writing and semiotics 3 comments september 12 2015 by seth long some questions about centrality measurements in text networks this gif alternates between a text network calculated for betweenness centrality smaller nodes overall and one calculated for degree centrality larger nodes it s normal to discover that most nodes in a network possess higher degree than betweenness centrality however in the context of human language what precisely is signified by this variation and is it significant another way of posing the question is to ask what exactly one discovers about a string of words by applying centrality measurements to each word as though it were a node in a network with edges between words to the right or left of it the networks in the gif visualize variation between two centrality measurements but there are dozens of others that might have been employed which centrality measurements if any are best suited for textual analysis when centrality measurements require the setting of parameters what should those parameters be and are they dependent on text size and ultimately what literary or rhetorical concept is centrality a proxy for the mathematical core of a centrality measurement is a distance matrix so what do we learn about a text when calculating word proximity and frequency of proximity if calculating edge weight do we learn anything that would have any relevance to anyone since the new critics it is not my goal yet to answer these questions but merely to point out that they need answers dh researchers using networks need to come to terms with the linear algebra that ultimately generates them although a positive correlation should theoretically exist between different centrality measurements differences do remain and knowing which measurement to utilize in which case should be a matter of critical debate for those using text networks a robust defense of network application in general is needed what is gained by thinking about text as a word network in an ideal case of course the la...