a picture is worth a thousand words

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.

5 Responses to “Obama Speeches”

  1. […] RSS RSS – Posts « Obama Speeches […]

  2. […] will go a step forward from this Obama Post. Remember in that case I counted all the words in more than one hundred Obama […]

  3. […] my other post related to Obama. The Obama Speeches Portrait, and the Obama […]

  4. Amanda Davis says:

    I am extremely distressed regarding the 2012 election. When I think about the trouble that is occuring in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East (not to mention the economy) we positively need a experienced leader. I’m not at all convinced that Barack Obama or any of the Republican candidates thus far have the experience or skills it takes to get the job done the way it has to be accomplished. Being president of this country is an tremendously hard job. Do you think there is any man or woman out there with the experience, skill, and moral conviction to do the job?

  5. […] first post about Barack Obama. One of my first words illustration was done in 2009 by using all the Obama speeches in the run for president. Nice words for people, I have to say. He became president in January 2009 […]