Presidential Speech Tag Clouds

This is SO WAY COOL! I’m so excited about it in a geeky kind of way. Dave over at Patahistory has linked to something called presidential speech tag clouds. You can link directly to his post here and read about it. You can link the tag clouds directly by clicking here. Once you are at the tag cloud site notice the button directly under George Bush’s name. Click on it and you will find it can move back to the left. As it travels left notice the tag clouds….they zoom back in time through all of the presidents.

This has many possibilities for research and classroom use. Have students compare and contrast tag clouds. When is terrorism first mentioned? Which president mentions war? Is there a president who doesn’t discuss the economy? Another possible activity could be to have students compare the tag clouds to actual events during a particular president’s administration.

It's also just very interesting!