Media Clouds
It’s time. In my last post I mentioned Danny’s discovery of Wordle, and after playing around with it for a few minutes I started wondering what would happen if you fed a whole news site at it. Would it be possible to quantify how much attention a story gets? Better yet, would it be possible to quantify the language used by different media sites if they all ran similar stories and you could compare the coverage? What type of stories does a news site prefer over its competitor?
Wordle may not be able to answer these questions, but perhaps it will provide a starting point. Wordle’s function is to absorb whatever text you throw at it, determine what words appear the most, and then create something that is at once pleasing to the eye, and full of useful information. Words that get repeated are made proportionally bigger, and since we’re visual creatures, the results may speak louder than a simple word count.
Of course, the news doesn’t stand still, so it trying to find answers from only a single day of stories would be inaccurate. Using five days worth of material would be better, and though it would probably be better still to take a whole year worth of samples (slightly difficult with the constant 24-hour news cycle), five days seemed like a sane way to start before committing to a schedule of daily copy-and-pastes. The following are tag clouds generated from five days worth of news site front pages, July 13th, 14th, 16th, 21st, and 23rd. Read on to kill your dial-up modem…
Litmus Test
The other night Danny and I were talking about tag clouds and a possible experiment that could be done using something called Wordle (see this post for more info about Wordle). The experiments requires that the news cycle be on “autopilot,” i.e., a general representation of what’s going on in the world over a long stretch of time. The recent swath of high-profile celebrity deaths has thrown a kink into the works (to put it lightly), so hopefully I’ll be able to put up some results in a week or two.
In completely other news, I’ve located another excellent source of OpenGL ES tutorials, this time from Simon Maurice. Jeff Lamarche, whose tutorials I posted a few weeks ago, has also added some new content and updated his project template to work with the new iPhone OS. Good stuff.
High Score
So Leora has written another insightful media analysis, and it makes me wonder who’s steering this ship. Although we as a society generally disapprove of sidelining our ethics, we also seem to take it for granted that large corporations, politicians, lawyers, and the misery industry all run on a diet of immorality and corruption (part of this complete breakfast). Last I checked, all of the above are run by the same people who complain that we’re headed towards dystopia thanks to our many vices. How did we gain this split personality, doing the devil’s work from 9-5 and then transforming back into indignant masses on evenings and weekends?
(Disclaimer: the author doesn’t believe in the devil, but presumes that anyone starting a career in malevolence would work for him.)
Our generation is getting ready to inherit the Earth (and her wonderful deficits), so keep this in mind, generation: now that it’s almost our turn to decide how the world turns, let’s try to beat our parents’ high score.
