Via phys.org [thanks to Alan Rothman]: “No historical record may capture the nation’s changing political consciousness better than the president’s State of the Union address, delivered each year except one since 1790. Now, a computer analysis of this unique archive puts the start of the modern era at America’s entry into World War I, challenging histories placing it after Reconstruction, the New Deal or World War II. A team of researchers at Columbia University and University of Paris published their results this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Though discussion of industry, finance and foreign policy dominate the record year after year, the study shows that modern political thought, defined by nation building, the regulation of business and the financing of public infrastructure, emerges with a sharp line after WWI. “We know what constitutes modern political thinking but until now have been unable to say exactly when it originated,” said the study’s senior author, Peter Bearman, a sociology professor at Columbia and a member of the Data Science Institute. “Overall, our study finds striking continuity throughout the State of the Union address and a few major changes. Surprisingly, we find that key moments of disruption were unrelated to changes in the mode of delivery.” The researchers developed algorithms to analyze the nearly 1.8 million words used by American presidents in their State of the Union addresses, from George Washington’s penned remarks in 1790 to Barack Obama’s televised speech in 2014. By identifying how often words appeared jointly, and mapping their relation to other clusters of words, researchers were able to infer the dominant social and political discourses of the day and chart their evolution over time.”

• Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014 [full text – PDF]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.