President Hosni Mubarak’s address of 10 February 2011 came the day before he left office, and running its text through IBM’s ManyEyes made the emphasis of the speech legible at a glance. Egypt sat at the centre of the cloud, several sizes larger than anything else, which is the nationalist register the speech was written in.
The next tier down was where the argument sat: youth, constitutional, amendments, commitment, responsibility, dialogue. It is the vocabulary of a leader offering procedural concessions to a protest movement. Freedom and democracy were not prominent — the words the crowds in Tahrir Square were using did not make it into the address that was meant to answer them.