vision
An interesting project here (found via Design Observer): In his piece "Hindsight is Always 20/20," Artist R. Luke Dubois has taken every President's State of the Union Speeches, combined the speeches of each President, and then sorted the frequency of which words were repeated by each President (eliminating united, states, the, his, etc). He then merged those words with the Snelling Chart - the familiar eye chart that uses letters of decreasing size. What he ends up with is a snapshot of the times, and a 'signature' of each administration. Shown here are the pages for FDR, Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. As Dubois says, "Looking back, we can use this vocabulary to test the metaphorical eyesight of the nation." You can see all 41 of them here: