The most enjoyable part of this weeks lesson was looking through the various Australian Election speeches. In searching different words I found it unexpectedly enlightening to work out what it was referring to. For example I searched the word ‘cheese’ thinking it was going to be rather amusing and discovered when looking through the speeches it referred to that it was mentioned when talking about the Dairy industry. Just in case you were interested the word ‘cheese’ appears most often in 1958 in the speech by Herbert Evatt, who mentioned it 4 times when talking about the losses experienced by the Australian Dairy industry during that time period.
The most intriguing search for me was looking for ‘sex’. I know, I couldn’t resist the call of immaturity. All mentions of it refer to gender obviously but the first mention ever was in Alfred Deakin’s speech where he talks about his plans to reduce the 6 laws of Marriage and Divorce in Australia to one single law that could be used all across the Commonwealth.
The only thing I found irritating about the “Explore the Election Speeches” function was that when it showed you the mentions of it in the speeches it didn’t tell you if it was in one only or both of the speeches. I only found this irritating since in clicking on the link it takes you to the given year that the speeches occurred but doesn’t not let you know which speech the term occurred in. I just found that slightly frustrating and if I was looking to add more ‘ease of use’ capabilities I would provide an indicator as to whose speech or speeches it occurred in.
