About this Website

Why there are analyses of inaugural speeches by Texan presidents and Biden on this page… and some acknowledgements.

Lars Hinrichs

My name is Lars Hinrichs and I’m an Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at UT Austin. You can find more about me here, and about the Texas English Linguistics Lab here.

Presented on this blog are some analyses of the language that was used in the “Texan” inaugural addresses that the country has had so far. Joe Biden’s 2021 inaugural speech is included for comparison. I made these for our segment about Texan inaugurals on The Texas Standard, which airs on public radio stations in Texas.

Analyses and visualizations were conducted in R (R Core Team 2020) and tidyverse (Wickham et al. 2019) using the RStudio GUI (RStudio Team 2020). The central package used in the NLP transformations is tidytext (Silge and Robinson 2016). The text of the inaugural addresses was obtained from the quanteda R-package (Benoit et al. 2018). POS-tagging was performed with cleanNLP (Arnold 2017) and reticulate (Ushey, Allaire, and Tang 2020).

This website was made using the distill package for R (Allaire et al. 2020).

Allaire, J. J., Rich Iannone, Alison Presmanes Hill, and Yihui Xie. 2020. Distill: ’r Markdown’ Format for Scientific and Technical Writing. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=distill.
Arnold, Taylor. 2017. “A Tidy Data Model for Natural Language Processing Using cleanNLP.” The R Journal 9 (2): 120. https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2017/RJ-2017-035/index.html.
Benoit, Kenneth, Kohei Watanabe, Haiyan Wang, Paul Nulty, Adam Obeng, Stefan Müller, and Akitaka Matsuo. 2018. “Quanteda: An r Package for the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data.” Journal of Open Source Software 3 (30): 774. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00774.
R Core Team. 2020. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.
RStudio Team. 2020. RStudio: Integrated Development Environment for r. Boston, MA: RStudio, PBC. http://www.rstudio.com/.
Silge, Julia, and David Robinson. 2016. “Tidytext: Text Mining and Analysis Using Tidy Data Principles in r.” JOSS 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00037.
Ushey, Kevin, J. J. Allaire, and Yuan Tang. 2020. Reticulate: Interface to ’python’. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=reticulate.
Wickham, Hadley, Mara Averick, Jennifer Bryan, Winston Chang, Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, Romain François, Garrett Grolemund, et al. 2019. “Welcome to the Tidyverse.” Journal of Open Source Software 4 (43): 1686. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686.

References

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