John Ibbitson wrote an interesting article today titled ‘How does U.S. democracy survive without its newspapers? ‘. Funny really, because most people in my social network today are posting and tweeting about almost the very opposite question: how blogs are an essential tool for democracy in Iran.

Well, not that funny, because after painting a dismal picture of the print media industry in the US. Ibbitson concludes that blogs and other web 2.0 based tools will answer the call.

For an interesting graphical analysis of the Iranian election debate I highly recommend reading the Internet and Democracy blog at Harvard: mapping Iran’s election.

During the US election and up to Obama’s Inauguration, Exvisu did a few studies to demonstrate the kind of intelligence we generate. We’ve collected English versions of these in a single PDF – some of our original posts were in French. One thing that’s important to note is that our source data for these analyses included both the blogosphere – the ‘traditional’ source for Exvisu – and Twitter, which is proving to be an extremely rich source of data to analyze.

Suite à notre analyse du discours relatif à l’inauguration d’Obama sur les tweets de la région de Montréal, j’ai pensé faire un portrait rapide de la discussion qui a suivi l’inauguration (21-23 janvier), cette fois sur la blogosphère francophone dans son entier.

Le graphique qui suit constitue en quelque sorte un polaroïd de la discussion: il illustre les 175 premiers mots utilisés dans la discussion, ainsi que les interrelations entre ces mots. Plus deux mots sont près l’un de l’autre, plus ils sont utilisés ensemble. La grosseur du point représente quant à elle la fréquence d’utilisation du mot: plus le point est gros, plus le mot a été utilisé souvent dans la discussion. Les secteurs colorés sont ajoutés après coup, par une brillante analyste (hum, moi). Ces secteurs représentent les différents aspects de la discussion, que je peux identifier, d’une part, grâce aux types de mots qui s’y trouvent et par le fait que je peux retourner dans ma base de donnée voir à quels billets précis un mot est rattaché.

Voici donc le graphique (cliquer dessus pour l’avoir en taille maximale), avec quelques remarques.

Snapshot Obama/Blogosphère francophone

Remarque préliminaire:La blogosphère francophone inclut ici, évidemment, autant les blogues québécois que français, etc. On voit dans ce graphique la présence de mots comme Paris, Sarkozy, France, ce qui tend à suggérer que la blogosphère française prédomine dans les données recueillies.

Notes sur les groupements:

A. Suivi “techonologique” des cérémonies: La question de savoir comment on a suivi les célébrations, ou quelles méthodes étaient mises en place pour que l’on puisse les suivre, était importante sur la blogosphère francophone. Prédominance de mots comme: image, blogs, facebook, vidéos, cnn… On voit des mots relatifs à une discussion concernant la censure chinoise de la cérémonie sur Internet. Je me permets ici de faire un clin d’oeil à Philippe Martin qui nous twittait et facebookait hier un lien vers une définition du Web 3.0, définition qui mentionnait: “If there is a moment that ushered in the era of Web 3.0, it might best be represented by President Obama’s Inauguration address in the United States on January 20th, 2009, an event experienced by millions in person and shared with many more millions of people simultaneously around the world.”

B. Le côté “people” de la cérémonie: Références à Jay-Z, Shakira, aux bals auxquels Obama et sa femme assisteront, au concert, à la robe de Michelle… L’importance et la teneur de ce groupement est à mon avis indicatif du statut de “star” qu’on accorde à Obama.

C. L’équipe d’Obama et l’organisation politique: Les noms de Clinton et Geithner sont ceux qui ressortent de l’équipe d’Obama, mais on note également une référence aux Kennedy (John et Caroline). La transition Bush-Obama entraîne donc des discussions sur les acteurs politiques américains en général. Notons la présence du mot “économie” au centre de ces discussions, ainsi que des termes “stimulus”, “plan”… L’économie semble l’enjeu primordial accolé à l’équipe d’Obama.

D. Politique étrangère: Si l’équipe d’Obama est associée aux enjeux économiques, Obama lui-même est associé aux mots suivants, qui sont qualitiés de “priorités”: Afghanistan, Moyen-Orient, Gaza, paix, Guantanamo (prison, fermeture), Irak, guerre… Intéressant de noter qu’une large partie de la discussion est donc consacrée aux priorités du nouveau président au point de vue de la politique étrangère. Il est aussi intéressant de voir que la réaction positive des pays africains(dont le Gabon) à l’élection d’Obama se retrouve aussi dans cette section politique, plutôt que dans la section “suivi des cérémonies”.

E. Dans le périmètre immédiat du mot “Obama”, quelques mots à connotation émotive (fierté, espoir) et d’autres qui reflètent les attentes des gens (sauver, relance, promesses, travail…). Notons également le nom de Bush tout près de celui de son remplaçant; cela reflète le fait que l’arrivée d’Obama est également décrite comme signifiant le départ très attendu de Bush. Les mots présents dans la section E font également écho à nos conclusions du billet précédent qui analysait les tweets concernant Obama avant son assermentation.

One of our most popular products is something we call a Conversation Capture. A Conversation Capture is an analysis of the entire blog-based discourse related to a particular subject. Our more advanced products are generally built with the intention of doing comparative analyses between, say, issues or brands or product features/benefits. For a Conversation Capture, we just take a single key concept and look at the discourse related to it in the blogs.

As a followup to our look at the Obama-McCain contest that we published in August, we decided to use this straightforward approach to take a look at a day of blog posts about Sarah Palin.

We built the dataset using posts from Monday, October 20 (840 posts total). This was the Monday following Palin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. Our assumption going in was that the discussion about that would completely dominate.

What we found, however, was very interesting:

Conversation Capture - Sarah Palin - Oct 20

As you can see in the Lexical Map, there was a large discussion about SNL, but there was also a very large discussion about an interview Palin gave with the Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she discussed a Constitutional Amendment that would prevent states from recognizing Gay marriage, among other things. In addition, a lot of attention was given to a speech that Jon Stewart gave in Boston.

Even more interesting, though, was the cluster related to the way Alaska’s oil revenues are distributed. By the end of last week there was quite a bit of discussion about the hypocrisy of Palin’s attacks on Obama as a socialist and Alaska’s oil revenue policies – but here we see that even on that Monday, the issue was clearly emerging in the blogosphere.

One of the other tools we like to use for our Conversation Capture is to build a list of word co-occurrences. Here is a sample excerpt:

Co-Occ

We see here as well that although the word “socialist” does appear often, it was not only used in the context of a description of her attacks on Obama but also related to the oil revenue situation in Alaska. As well, it is clear that her position on gay marriage is significant – more significant than Joe the Plumber, for sure.

With the US Political Convention season in full swing, we thought we’d present a short demonstration of how Exvisu’s blogosphere analysis can shed light on the discourse related to political campaigns, candidates, and issues. In mid-July, we performed an analysis of the English blogosphere related to the upcoming US Presidential election. We focused specifically on Free Trade and NAFTA, which became a key issue during Primary season.

The following map was generated using a dataset including all blog posts (there were 946 total posts after filtering for spam) for a structured series of queries between July 14 and July 18. We then performed a lexical analysis that identified and mapped the relationship between the top 150 words in the dataset.

Obama - McCain - NAFTA

Observations

• McCain and Obama are both located at the center of the map – which is to be expected, since these were used as keywords to establish the dataset. All of the words on the map are arranged by their relationship to their nearest 5 other nodes (words), and the relative size of each node is directly proportional to its resonance in the dataset.
• When performing such an analysis, words that appear on the map tend to self-organize into clusters that define concepts that are important. In this case, there were 6 significant conceptual clusters related to important events of that week: Gov. Mark Sanford’s gaffe in an interview on CNN; Michigan speeches by both Obama and McCain; McCain’s speech at the La Raza Convention; issues related to free trade and trade agreements; the “flip-flop” question, and general political and social issues that are at play during the election season.
• In terms of positives for McCain during that week, the strong cluster related to his speech at La Raza is particularly interesting. In this speech, McCain was quoted as saying that he’s an “unapologetic supporter” of free trade. “Unapologetic” and “supporter” are the words which connected this cluster with the general free trade cluster to its left (and this connection is largely responsible for their proximity on the map). That is not to say that this declaration is the only thing in play for McCain on this issue – as we read the blog posts that make up the free trade cluster, we noticed that the controversy surrounding McCain’s trip to Ottawa in June was still very evident in the text.
• The other negative cluster related to McCain was related to Sanford’s inability to distinguish specific ways that McCain’s economic policy proposals differed from those of Bush in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. One of the important innovations of this kind of lexical analysis is that it allows us to identify which stories resonate the most in a given period of time, and the fact that a single story related to a single on-air interview by a McCain surrogate even appears on this graph demonstrates the influence that even a small problem can have once it’s picked up in the blogs.
• It’s also interesting to note the other individuals who appear among the top 150 words on the map. Other than Obama and McCain, we also see the following people: Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Phil Gramm, Austan Goolsbee, and Sanford.
  • Gramm, the former McCain Campaign co-chair, was in the news due to his assertion that America had “become a nation of whiners” following which he resigned his position in the campaign. His name is directly connected to the words “nation,” “political,” “economic,” and “advisor.”
  • Austan Goolsbee is Obama’s key economic advisor and appears because he is widely cited by bloggers that take a close look at Obama’s economic and trade policies.
  • The fact that both Clintons appear among the top 150 words in the map is an indication of the importance they still wield related to this year’s election cycle.
• The last cluster to note is related to the “flip-flop” question. This is a relatively small cluster but contains words directly related to Obama including “fisa” and “public finance.” At the time of this analysis, this question was still very much alive.

As the election draws closer we’ll perform at least one additional analysis of this kind that will allow us to see how these issues have developed since mid-July. Feel free to ask questions or note any additional trends in the comments.