You may remember the scene from the film Dead Poet's Society where Robin Williams' character introduces his students to a method of appraising poems mathematically. But, free-spirited Whitman lover that he is, it's all a ruse! He tells them to rip the offending chapter out of their text books.
A few years later I was studying for an English literature degree and having a conversation with a tutor about this scene. He suggested it was where the film went wrong, passing up the opportunity to put rigorous literary analysis on celluloid. I was tempted to agree.
It was with such a background I approached the New York Times' rather neat tool for textual analysis of each of George Bush's seven state of the union addresses. You type in a word and it tells you when, how often and in what sense he used it. For example, the peak year for "democracy" was 2005 (before the 2003 Iraq invasion, Mr Bush had used it only once); for the one and only mention of climate change you have to wait until 2007.
Comments around the office have oscillated between "wow" and "breathtakingly clever, or just a little boring?". But I'll keep clicking away, wondering why "hope" went from a low of two mentions in 2004 to a high of 20 in 2006. The detractors can go and stand on their desks.
