President Obama’s Education Policy Speech March 9, 2009

President Obama used a talk to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as a forum for a major address on administration education policy. Among his "four pillars of reform," he called for an expansion of charter school as "laboratories of innovation." For text transcript of Obama's speech click here. 

I decided to use Many Eyes to do a textual analysis of these two key words from his talk – "charter" and "innovation." I used the word tree visualization. 

Obama's use of the word "Charter"

Obama's use of the word "Innovation"

Many Eyes in the classroom
Many Eyes is a great new website that gives teachers and students a chance to easily use sophisticated graphic tools to analyze data and create interactive displays. Those who register at the site can use 16 visualization types to present data. Why not have your students use Many Eyes to analyze a selection of non-fiction text to uncover the main ideas and key vocabulary of the piece? Or they could compare text from different sources. Want your students to more fully understand your course content? Let them use Many Eyes to visualize and discover patterns as a catalyst for discussion and collective insights about information, text, and data. As they say at Many Eyes, "Finding the right way view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental."

When to use a Word Tree
A word tree is a visual search tool for unstructured text, such as a book, article, speech or poem. It lets you pick a word or phrase and shows you all the different contexts in which it appears. The contexts are arranged in a tree-like branching structure to reveal recurrent themes and phrases.

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