The State of the City is Good


I’m building a corpus of State of the City speeches from around the United States. My short-term goal is to collect three years of speeches for America’s ten biggest cities. The Github repo is here and a Google Sheet tracking my progress is here.

If you’re interested in speechwriting, comparative local politics, or quantitative text analysis feel free to contribute, edit, or analyze.

One small finding from today: generally the number of lines in a speech correlate with the number of words in a speech. This isn’t very surprising. But there are a few speeches that buck this trend. Specifically the 2017 New York City speech, which has a big-paragraph style, and the 2015, 2016, and 2017 San Diego speeches, which use short and simple lines.