The first part is an interactive map with every place name we could find using the Stanford Natural Language Toolkit and some (Fraas-flavored) elbow grease. Then we got two great historians of American foreign policy, Dael Norwood and Gretchen Heefner, to explain some of the things in the maps.
The second is about individual words presidents use. So the recent rise in "Freedom," the references to the Constitution predominantly in the time of crisis, and so forth.
My favorite feature, and one that the Atlantic team executed beautifully, is the deep access into individual texts: click on a circle or a bar, and you are off reading the actual paragraph from the state of the union that uses that word on mentions that place. This has always been a core feature of Bookworm on various levels--by treating paragraphs as documents for the modelling, it's easy to drill straight to the interesting stuff. One thing that's mostly missing are the Ngrams-style line charts. I've been saying for a while that I hope people see Bookworm enabling other forms of visualization. These pages are a great example of that; maps and bar charts of words are just as engaging, and sometimes things like "presidents" and "the world" are more engaging than individual years.
But for the text analysis crowd, I also wanted to tell you a little more about the link down right at the bottom of the second (words) piece, and get a little technical about why that, although we decided not to include on the Atlantic site, contains the germ of something I find pretty interesting for online text analysis in general.
