grasping for meaning in the words that swirl all about us
[OT from cottage renovations]
This fascinating link comes from my favourite postgrad student. Culturnomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behaviour using global news media tone in time and space.
"News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events. Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30-year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden’s likely hiding place as a 200-kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world’s cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as “news is becoming more negative” and “American news portrays a U.S.-centric view of the world” are found to have merit."
Yet again, once information gets into machine readable form there's no limit to the interesting things that can be done with it.
This entry was originally posted at http://15-the-circle.dreamwidth.org/329666.html. Please comment there using OpenID.