Obama Speeches

Click in the image for high resolution. You can also download the PDF English version or the Spanish one. In the PDF version the words are vectors so you can print it in a very large format (ISO-A1 or so) to have a nice poster for your office/room.

Download Obama Speeches (English version).pdf (360kB).

Download Obama Speeches (Spanish version).pdf (360kB).

All those images are free for non-commercial personal use. You can distribute freely, but you cannot modify them in any way. Please refer to this site if you redistribute them.

Inspired by the excellent work of Jeff Clark (http://neoformix.com/) I coded an algorithm in Processing that transform images in words in different ways.

I have tested it for a few months and now I want to share the results with you. This is the first example of a series of texts art images that Iwill be posting in the next weeks. Here is the process…

First I took the transcriptions of more than one hundred Obama speeches from the website http://obamaspeeches.com/. Then I counted all words using an adapted version of the Snowball stemmer for Processing (thanks to Lot!, http://feenelcaos.org/). I also picked up an Obama photo using Google Image to find a good one.

Finally I use my ‘image pattern searcher’ algorithm (I have to find a name for it) to fit all the words in the image. In this case the more times the word appears in the speeches the bigger it is (proportionally).

Here you have an example of the 20 more often words in the speech:  can,785, american,683 , people,648, one,619, time,561, years,548, country,521, work,481, make,477, need,454, just,440, know,415, america,399, go,384, come,356, care,355, nation,352, now,345, like,343, right,332.

In order to get a nicer result I also let the algorithm reuse words but only in a smaller font size.

Note that the Spanish version of this image used a direct Google translation of the English words. So some of them may sound like “Spanglish” or have a bad translation because Google cannot take care of the context.