For this case study, we will take a look at the full text of State of the Union addresses. The State of the Union is an annual message that the President provides to Congress. The purpose is to provide an economic and diplomatic overview, as well as outline the legislative agenda. I would characterize it as your typical political feel-good propaganda, sprinkled with false hope and enthusiasm. I'm too old and too wise to consider it anything else.
The data is in an R package sotu. It consists of the text and metadata for 236 addresses, both oral and written.
The learning goals for us are to explore work frequency, Abraham Lincoln's addresses, the sentiment of the addresses around the time of the US Civil War, topic models for the speeches from the time of the escalation of the Vietnam War to the present, political party classification modeling, and finally some of the advanced speech methods applied to two different Presidents.