Processing the Inauguration in the Cloud

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Cross-posted from Cliotech

Now that the festivities of the inauguration are behind us, we can start to process the images and words of that historical day.

Here are some tips and resources to help you process the day with your students:

Wordle of the Inaugural Address

Wordle: Obama's Speech

You can create your own Wordle online. Another free service similar to Wordle to try out is TagCrowd. It would be really interesting to compare the tag clouds of different inaugural addresses. Here is an example. The New York Times created tag clouds for all the inaugural addresses going back to President Washington – orientated along a horizontal timeline. You can also access the full text of those speeches on the timeline.


If you import the text of the inaugural address into Microsoft Word, you can use the Auto Summary feature to create different visualizations of the speech. Here are two samples:

If you have never used Auto Summary, click here for Word 2007 instructions or click here for Word 2000/2003 instructions.

There are some free online and open source text summarizers that are also great resources.

If you want to access images of the day check out the Presidential Inaugural Committee’s Photostream on Flickr, the Official Inaugural Book on Photobucket, or any of the many Flickr groups created for community members to share their images. If you are seeking general images from the campaign, check out the photo gallary on MyBarackObama or the official campaign Flickr photostream.

You can also view a video of the whistle stop tour.







Turbo Tagger

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Comments

  1. Traci

    I loved seeing the President’s speech in a Wordle! What a great way to summarize with key words. Wordle is a great Web2.0 tool! I recently began using it with my students. They have created “self” Wordles and have used Wordle for their Spelling practice tests. They love it! I’ll have to check out TagCloud… thanks for sharing the other free online text summarizers.

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