Presidential Inaugural Addresses

About the Speeches

The set of text that I chose to primarily work with in this project is the Presidential Inaugural Addresses from Alan Liu's Data Collections and Datasets which was generated from The American Presidency Project. The collection consists of 42 inaugural addresses, beginning with George Washington and ending with Donald Trump. However, they do exclude Presdient Millard Fillmore and Gerald Ford, as there were no clear inaugural addresses for them. I chose to only include first inaugural addresses, since some presidents have been elected for several terms, I felt as if this be more affective and not necessary to add for my project. However, I did include both of President Grover Cleveland's inaugural address as he was elected at two separate points within history and I did not want to leave a gap, since they do contain different content. 

In analyzing the speeches, I began to ask questions about where the presidents received their education from, where they went to college, what level of degree they received, what their degree is in. I started my research process of gathering and collecting the necessary information that would allow me to make data visualizations related to overlap in presidential education patterns. The data I extracted after researching the education background of the presidents is below. The excel sheet provides what the dataset looks like that I have created and will use throughout the entirety of my project to generate my data visualizations. 

I began examining my data by using Network Analysis and Data Visualization to show the connections between shared colleges of the presidents. I then moved into a visualization of the degrees that were received by the presidents. To incorporate the use of the actual Inaugural Speeches I used text analysis to provide the two sides, formal education versus no formal education, to then examine the content of their speeches. Through the combined use of both the text and education dataset, some distinctions can be made about the level of writing in presidents that have a college education and others that do not. The intentions of my project are to accurately visualize the distinction in educations levels of the presidents and the content and diction of their first Inaugural Address. 

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