Upturned Earth

“… to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” – George Orwell

August 5, 2008 • 8:08 pm

Le Huh?

Le Monde’s American politics blog has a short piece up about my bit in the Globe on campaign blogging. I do not parlez any Francais, and can make out only the very faint outlines of what is being said. Anything interesting in there, French readers?

Filed under: personal

3 Responses - Comments are closed.

  1. Fear and loathing in Georgetown says:
    August 6, 2008 at 3:13 am

    Basically, it is explaining what you did, but then points out that from looking at McCain’s one would guess that it is Obama’s because of, well, the huge freakin’ Obama in it. And, conversely, that Obama doesn’t mention McCain.

  2. Nicola says:
    August 6, 2008 at 4:55 am

    My French is better than I’d feared!

    All of a sudden, the big words

    It’s an incredibly simple idea: put the candidates’ campaign blogs in Wordle, a site that generates clouds of words based on large quantities of text, and see what words are used most frequently (besides articles and other little words).

    John Schwenkler, professor of philosophy at Berkeley (and follower of Bob Barr), has done it, and the Boston Globe has made an instructive page. Look at this graphic, for example.

    Contrary to what one might think, it isn’t a word cloud representing Barack Obama’s blog, but John McCain’s. Yes, the most commonly used word on the “McCain Report” is “Obama”: this is a pretty accurate reflection of the way the campaign team uses the blog, as a tool mostly to attack its adversary’s positions.

    On the other hand, on the Obama campaign blog’s word cloud, you find almost no trace of John McCain. “Obama” is the most used word there, with “McCain” far behind “Clinton.” And the second most used word is “Change”: this too is a pretty accurate reflection of the campaign’s strategy.

  3. John says:
    August 6, 2008 at 6:30 am

    Excellent, thanks very much.

    Nicola, I now owe you twice over: for the translation, and also for the pointer to Wordle of course.

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