Inaugural Address Corpus Analysis (Voyant Tools) (Daniel Lugo)
To link public sentiment and presidential goals, I analyzed inaugural addresses using Voyant
Tools to identify patterns across presidencies. I initially struggled because the first 3 presidents
had documentation that Voyant couldn’t use. The addresses were either scanned within a book
or magazine that added bends and tilts, making it easy to read for the human eye but not as
much for software like Voyant. In response to this, I used Claude to transcribe these documents
into PDFs and deleted words that weren’t part of the address.
For this analysis, I primarily used Voyant’s Terms and Trends tools, tracking word frequency
changes across addresses, as well as the Correlations tool. I focused on a few themes that I
noticed across all presidents: educational/academic diction, Christianity, and community-like
speech.
Cowling vs. Later Addresses
The most surprising difference when comparing the addresses is how heavily Cowling’s address
leans on religious and mostly Christian language. Words like “Christian,” “church,” “religion,”
and “Bible” rank among his highest-frequency terms. In contrast, later addresses show a steady
separation from that vocabulary, with “Christian” appearing far less frequently and being partially
replaced by terms like “community” and “liberal arts.” This tracks well with how the school’s
mission statement has changed over time, veering away from a religious identity.
Cowling also uses “college” at an extraordinarily high rate compared to later presidents. This
specifically surprised me because if anything, the school was more established as a college in
later years, but with further research, I learned that at the time, Cowling was really adamant on
the school being a college and not seen as a university. This is an example of how we are able
to understand and interpret sentiment through digital tools. Later addresses stopped using this
defensive diction, probably because the question of Carleton’s identity as a college rather than a
university had been determined by then.
One thing to consider when comparing the addresses directly is that they vary in length,
meaning that even if some words are mentioned more in one compared to another, this might
also be due to the lack of word count. Comparing through relative frequency still helps, but it’s
something to keep in mind when concluding a sentiment.
Overall, the addresses outline how Carleton initially had a very clear Christian-education in its
mission and gradually shifted towards the liberal arts, which lines up with what the Carletonian
suggests about presidential sentiment more broadly.