r-sotu

The President of the United States is constitutionally obligated to provide a report known as the 'State of the Union'. The report summarizes the current challenges facing the country and the president's upcoming legislative agenda. While historically the State of the Union was often a written document, in recent decades it has always taken the form of an oral address to a joint session of the United States Congress. This package provides the raw text from every such address with the intention of being used for meaningful examples of text analysis in R. The corpus is well suited to the task as it is historically important, includes material intended to be read and material intended to be spoken, and it falls in the public domain. As the corpus spans over two centuries it is also a good test of how well various methods hold up to the idiosyncrasies of historical texts. Associated data about each address, such as the year, president, party, and format, are also included.