1 The Data

Scope, source, and preparation of the data. The older texts are taken from the R-package “quanteda.” Biden’s is taken from the Washington Post’s transcript.

Lars Hinrichs http://larshinrichs.site (The University of Texas at Austin)
01-20-2021

Scope of the data

We analyze the inaugural addresses of the “Texan” presidents. These are

To justify this choice, it is important to note that we are interested in “culturally” Texan presidents. If we were interested in place of birth, we’d also have to include Eisenhower (born in TX but didn’t live there), and not the Bushes (born outside of TX but lived there).

We will also be adding Joseph R. Biden’s inaugural speech to the mix, for comparison.

Bush 45’s second inauguration. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Source of the data

We’re using the version of the speeches that is included in the quanteda R-package (Benoit et al. 2018). The following code grabs the speeches from the package in the corpus data format, then converts it to a regular dataframe. - Biden’s speech was taken from the transcript published by the Washington Post about two hours after 2021 inauguration.

bidentxt <- readLines("../../biden-2021.txt") %>%
  paste(collapse=" ") %>% 
  str_trim()

biden <- tibble(doc_id = "2021-Biden", 
                text = bidentxt, 
                year = 2021, 
                president = "Biden", 
                first_name = "Joseph R.", 
                party = "Democratic", 
                nickname = "Joe")

txpres <- c("Johnson", "Bush")

corpus <- data_corpus_inaugural %>% 
  quanteda::convert(to = "data.frame") %>% 
  filter(President %in% txpres) %>% 
  mutate(nickname = case_when(
    FirstName == "Lyndon Baines" ~ "LBJ",
    FirstName == "George" ~ "Bush41",
    TRUE ~ "Bush43"
  )) %>% 
  janitor::clean_names()

corpus <- 
  corpus %>% 
  rbind(biden)

corpus %>% 
  mutate(text = str_sub(text, 1, 40)) %>% 
  as_tibble() %>% 
  kbl() %>% 
  kable_paper()
doc_id text year president first_name party nickname
1965-Johnson My fellow countrymen, on this occasion, 1965 Johnson Lyndon Baines Democratic LBJ
1989-Bush Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. President, Vice P 1989 Bush George Republican Bush41
2001-Bush President Clinton, distinguished guests 2001 Bush George W. Republican Bush43
2005-Bush Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice 2005 Bush George W. Republican Bush43
2021-Biden Chief Justice Roberts, Vice President Ha 2021 Biden Joseph R. Democratic Joe


Down the line, this data can be tokenized and/or marked up as needed. We’ll save this version so we can come back to it.

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.

References

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Hinrichs (2021, Jan. 20). Texan Inaugural Addresses: 1 The Data. Retrieved from https://texan-inaugurals.netlify.app/posts/1-the-data/

BibTeX citation

@misc{hinrichs20211,
  author = {Hinrichs, Lars},
  title = {Texan Inaugural Addresses: 1 The Data},
  url = {https://texan-inaugurals.netlify.app/posts/1-the-data/},
  year = {2021}
}