Dr.King meets the Founding Fathers

After throwing Dr.King’s “I have a dream” speech and the opening of the declaration of independence into a word cloud, I drew out some key terms to analyze through Ngram.

First of all, here are the word clouds:

 

“I have a dream”                                   Declaration on Independence

 

Before I touch upon the Ngram, I would just like to show that there is some overlap in the vocabulary of these two texts. First of all MLK uses satisfied and the Dec. on Ind. uses happiness. The similarities are seen also with nation and government, freedom and equal, etc. To my knowledge the two words that are matched in both clouds are Rights and God.

Now here are Ngrams of 3 defining words from each, as well ass the 2 words they share. I have 1 Ngram from 1800-2000 and 1 from 1750-2000 because I thought it would be important to capture the time period that the Dec. was actually written in.

 

 

 

I noticed a few interesting things about these graphs.

1. There was a huge spike in the words government and nation after WWI and WWII

2. There are local maximums for freedom, justice, and rights in 1968, the year MLK was assassinated.

3.Between 1920-1940 the word God went to a maximum at 1930, only to fall to the lowest point yet by 1940. This is probable because of good fortunes in the roaring 20’s coupled with the reformist movement (that lead to prohibition). The dip was probably due to the Great Depression.

4.The frequency of every word is falling in the 70’s except for rights. This may show the importance of the word during that time. Also note that rights is the most improved word.