sotu-package: sotu: State of the Union Addresses

In sotu: United States Presidential State of the Union Addresses

sotu: State of the Union Addresses

Description

The President of the United States is constitutionally obligated to provide a report of the current state of country. While historically this could be a written document, in modern times this has always taken the form of an oral address to a joint session of the US Congress. This package provides the raw text from every State of the Union address, with the intention of being used for meaningful examples of text analysis in R. This corpus is well-suited to the task as a it historically important, includes both material intended to be read and material intended to be spoken, and it falls in the public domain. As the corpus spans over two centuries it is also a good test of how well various methods hold up to the idiosyncrasies of historical texts.

Details

A metadata table containing information about each speech is also included in the package. This includes information about the date and president giving the address. Note that some of the addresses contained in the archive are not technically State of the Union Addresses, but are more general Addresses to a Joint Session of Congress. Usually these occur following a new president's inauguration, and are historically treated as no different than a standard State of the Union.

Author(s)

Maintainer: Taylor B. Arnold [e-mail]

See Also

Useful links:

• https://github.com/statsmaths/sotu/

• Report bugs at https://github.com/statsmaths/sotu/issues/

sotu documentation built on Aug. 17, 2022, 5:06 p.m.