The Greatest Speech Ever Made

I decided to create a distant reading visualization using the text of Charlie Chaplin’s “Greatest Speech Ever Made,” delivered, with the protagonist dressed as Hitler, at the end of his classic film, The Great Dictator. I was fascinated to discover that — despite somewhat extensive tweaking — the final product appeared to embody the very things it purportedly railed against. Chaplin’s speech is a takedown of machinery and automated intelligence, advocating for the reinvigoration of compassion into modernized societies  Yet, the largest words were: men, hate, people, world, power — the very things the speech criticized.

In that sense, the visualizations outlined the problems in the world just as effectively as Chaplin’s rhetoric, but does not sufficiently account for the solutions, clearly mentioned less frequently over the course of the speech. It was important to me that the visualization featured literal shades of gray, in order to illustrate the binary Chaplin seeks to distance himself from in the speech. Still, given the style of the film itself, true color seemed to be inappropriate to me. All in all, given the dramatic emphasis of the concepts the speech clearly identifies as undesirable the visualization did not strike me as accurate, despite the manner with which it informs elements of Chaplin’s argument.

I would have loved a visualization tool that let me move words around so as to contextualize the words. For example, Chaplin constantly affirms that x is needed more than why (“more than machinery  we need humanity, more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness”). I think that redistributing the words within that framework would have served an enormously constructive purpose in terms of telling Chaplin’s story in fewer words. I think the use of objects and shapes, in addition to words, would have added to the images. There is almost a chart-like nature to the way the speech is delivered (“men who despite you, enslave you, who regiment your lives”), so adding lines and boxes would allow for adjectives to be more easily matched with their respective nouns, enhancing the narrative of the image. In terms of animation  it would be extremely cool for the adjectives to shuffle and then be replace with their positive alternatives (“dont fight for slavery,” becomes “fight for liberty,” with the key words dancing in and out, matching up with other phrases to convey the terminological dance of the speech).