Category: 2008 U.S.

the visual display of qualitative information

If you really want to know what it’s in the criminal complaint filed against Rod Blagojevich, you can read it. But in this 2.0 world, why read when you can visualize? Bill Allison at the Sunlight Foundation’s Real Time Investigations blog uploaded the complaint (via) to a site called Many Eyes, which is the kind of site I wish I’d already known about, and which offers a number of ways to visualize text.

(Unfortunately, wordpress strips out the code that makes it possible to embed these images at their full size and functionality, so I’ve re-sized these images to be larger than what the embed codes were giving me. If you click through, you’ll be able to do all sorts of things, like re-arrange the displays, search for particular words and phrases, count or highlight specific occurrences, and even zoom in on the word tree.)

Let’s start with a Wordle:

blagojevich-complaint-wordle

That gives you an idea of the most important topics/people in the complaint, but it’s more of a bird’s eye perspective. If you want more precision, albeit at the cost of some visual elegance, you could look at a couple of tag clouds:

Here’s a cloud formed on the basis of single words:

blagojevich-complaint-one-word

And here’s a two-word tag cloud:

blagojevich-complaint-two-word

The two-word format does a better job capturing many of the subjects – not just the proper names, but also senate candidate, financial advisor, planning board, campaign contributions, and so on – as well as the alleged activities – Blagojevich spoke, Blagojevich talked, attempted extortion, phone calls. But it also has some pairings that are simply the result of the stylistic conventions of a criminal complaint. For example, the phrase “2008 rod,” which has 53 occurrences, isn’t a phrase in the usual sense – it’s the result of writing out the date of an alleged action (in 2008), followed by Blagojevich’s first name: “…the morning of November 12, 2008, Rod Blagojevich talked to Fundraiser A…”

Finally, the most innovative and analytically interesting visualization is the word tree. Want to know how the Senate candidates appear in the text?:

blagojevich-senate-candidate

Judging by the number of occurrences, Senate candidate 3, who appears to have been identified, is looking pretty good.

Incidentally: a cursory search for profanity doesn’t turn up nearly as much as you’d expect from the news coverage.

analogy watch

How long until the Truman:Pendergast::Obama:Blagojevich analogy shows up in the major media? Never mind if the person making the analogy does a good job with differences and historical specifics. I’d just be amazed if it’s not made at all.

only in America a democracy

With the talk of Obama’s election being something that could only happen in America, it’s no surprise to find people pointing out that, well, not only could “it” – meaning a similar electoral victory, of course – happen elsewhere, but “it” has in some cases already happened elsewhere. But this piece in Slate is a bit confused about what “it” is.

On one side, there are some good examples*:

The truth is that Obama-style chiefs of state—people who came out of stigmatized ethnic minorities or “foreign” enclaves to lead their governments—are an uncommon but regularly recurring part of history. Alberto Fujimori, who held both Peruvian and Japanese citizenship, was elected president of Peru in 1990. Sonia Gandhi, born Edvige Antonia Albina Maino in northern Italy, led her Congress Party to a resounding victory in India’s 2004 elections. Daniel arap Moi is from the Kalenjin people, not the Luo or Kikuyu who are the nation’s largest ethnic groups and its centers of political gravity. But this did not bar him being president of Kenya from 1978 to 2002.

To them you could probably add Evo Morales in Bolivia. And going back to the 19th century, there’s Benjamin Disraeli’s selection as Prime Minister of the UK.

But on the other side are the poor examples:

Last week, the New York Times told us Europe would not soon—indeed might never—see a political triumph like Obama’s. It described British politics as though Disraeli had never existed and painted a similar picture of mono-ethnic France.

Desolé, cher collegues, but one year after the far-off, sunny isle of Corsica was acquired by France in 1768, there was born there one Napoleon Bonaparte, whose heavy Italian accent made him seem even more exotic to la France profonde than his strange name.

I guess Napoleon did win a lot of campaigns.

Next up:

And speaking of German accents, the Times thumb-sucker also foresaw that there would be no German Obama any time soon. Bad timing for them: Three days later, Germany’s Greens elected Cem Ozdemir, an ethnic Turk, as their new leader.

And the Greens, being the ruling party of Germany, must make their leader the Chancellor, right? At least that example is still within the realm of electoral politics. Unlike, say,

Stalin, of course, wasn’t Russian.

Stalin vetted his advisers very thoroughly, it should be noted. And he rose from being just a humble secretary too.

Meanwhile,

It’s a matter of some debate whether Alexander the Great was ethnically Greek.

Some said he was too Greek; others, not Greek enough. And Greece was the birthplace of democracy, so he must have been elected.

That not enough for you? The path of liberty soon turned west from Greece. And what do we find?

Quite a few rulers of the Roman Empire came from underprivileged, barbarian families in North Africa, Syria, and the Balkans. The Times‘ portrait of ethnically blinkered European politics would have surprised not only Disraeli and Napoleon, but also, inter alios, such second- and third-century Roman emperors as Philippus (known as Philip the Arab for his ethnicity), Septimius Severus (father Roman, mother North African), and Diocletian (humble stock from Dalmatia, present-day Croatia).

Hey, did you know that the Mongols weren’t Chinese, and yet they ruled China for a while? And the Qing ruled China for even longer, and they weren’t Chinese either! And yet we call their emperors emperors of China.

But why stop there? What about Carl XIV Johan, King of Sweden and Norway, born Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte and once Marshal of France (more French than Napoleon, who appointed him)? And the 19th century Greek monarchy had not just the House of Wittelsbach but the House of Glücksburg (in fairness, the later monarchs seem to have been Greece-born).

Or maybe it would be a good idea to just stop with the good examples, give a bit more depth to the comparisons, and acknowledge that Obama’s victory was not unique, but still quite rare.

____

*Unfortunately, many of these leaders were more successful in elections than in governing.

the dial turns spur the worm; the worm turns, spurns

This is a good background piece on those “squiggly lines” that showed up on CNN during the debates, but I would have liked to have learned more about previous uses of so-called “dial testing” in election coverage. The feature is novel to most of us Americans – unlike after-the-fact focus groups, which have been around a while – but the worldly commenters at Crooked Timber* point out that Australian television has been using a similar feature for some time.

Over there it’s called “the worm”; it even has a wikipedia entry. And in October 2007 it was involved in a bit of controversy:

Australian PM John Howard has denied involvement in a decision to ban a graphic that tracks audience opinion during a live TV election debate.

Critics accused Mr Howard of coercing the host, the National Press Club, to ban the use of the “worm”.

Channel Nine’s feed was cut 25 minutes into the debate between Mr Howard and the opposition leader Kevin Rudd.

The controversy has eclipsed the issues under discussion, which included the economy and Australia’s role in Iraq.

Glad to see the US is not the only country with the proper sense of priorities. So how did the debate turn out?

Channel Nine switched first to an ABC and then a Sky News feed, and superimposed the worm without any disruption to its coverage.

According to the worm, Mr Rudd was the overall winner of the debate. Opinion in Australia is divided on whether the worm really has any impact on voters.

Of course, it’s not just a question of whether the worm has an impact on voters; there’s also the question of how well it represents voters. Howard went on to lose the election. Maybe it was a coincidence.

 
*I endorse the suggestion that the networks keep up the squiggly lines for the post-debate coverage. And for other programming.

small town (numerical) values

It’s really sort of remarkable, the lengths some people will go to in order to hide the metropolitan reality of this country. And that’s assuming that Wasilla and all other similarly-sized cities are small towns that are not, as surely some of them are, actually suburbs just on the edge of urbanized areas.

cultural geography

Isn’t Wasilla really more of a suburb than a small town? The city website’s “At Work” page talks about “small-town living” but the statistics sure look like “suburb” (or “exurb”):

One of the Mat-Su Borough’s chief exports is labor. Wasilla residents and most of the Borough’s population live within 40 to 50 miles of the state’s largest city, Anchorage, and approximately 35 percent of Mat-Su workers commute. Many local residents who work in other locations were first drawn to Wasilla because of its affordable housing and the benefits of small-town living.

A significant number of workers travel even longer distances. These commuters—about 10 percent of borough residents—include North Slope oil workers, construction workers who travel among various parts of the state, and commercial fishers (120 area residents hold commercial fishing permits).

These population statistics suggest the same thing. Look at the high rate of growth for the city and the borough of which it is a part since the 1990 census.* Wasilla may still be fairly small, but it certainly appears to be following the path of a lot of other former small towns that have been incorporated into larger metropolitan areas through the processes of urban and suburban growth.

There’s been a trend in recent years towards urban living, but if I’m not mistaken, more Americans live in suburban than in urban or rural areas. And as anyone who follows current debates over transit and urbanism knows, suburbs have no shortage of defenders. Better schools, larger houses with private yards, access to open space, more light, often cleaner air and water – there are a lot reasons many people favor suburbs over many central city areas.** Combine that with proximity to the cultural and economic power of a city and you have a pretty good idea of why many choose suburbs over small towns, perhaps after an initial move to the central city.

But how often do you hear about “suburban values”? The phrase doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation, but compare it to “small-town values”: why, after decades of suburban growth, does the latter ideal still retain such power, and political power in particular? I suppose the quick explanation is that it is the continuing influence of the agrarian ideal, but that’s somehow not very satisfying, especially since the shift away from “independent yeoman farmer” to “small-town resident, possibly but quite often not self-employed” was a non-trivial one. Why hasn’t there been another shift?

Last year on CNN Candy Crowley ran a story about Congress and its low approval rating. It was the usual “Congress isn’t getting much done, find some people to criticize it on camera for being out of touch, don’t mention the filibuster or the veto” kind of story. One of the people quoted was described as a small-town mayor. A quick search online revealed the small town to be near O’Hare airport, to have been founded as a suburb, to contain a large business park, and to have a mayor so distant from Congress and its concerns that he was mentioned as a possible candidate for Henry Hyde’s seat in the House when Hyde retired. (He chose not to run).

____
*Also check out the relatively low median age and high percentage of residents under 18: probably a lot of young families with children.

**Yes, not everyone, and not every suburb over every central city. That’s why I wrote many. But it’s no use denying that there are plenty of people who choose suburbs for these reasons.

unconventional

When I watched a little of the coverage of the Democratic convention this afternoon, I thought I was watching the Olympics again; when I looked at the coverage later in the evening, I was glad to see that the stadium had filled up. There was some talk a week or two ago about the weather: some Obama opponents had been hoping for rain. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I’m not so sure rain would have been such a downer.

One of my favorite movie sequences of all time is the convention scene in Meet John Doe. It’s held in a heavy rain and through the downpour the sight of all those umbrellas is quite striking both visually and as a sign of the dedication of the delegates. On the other hand, it ends in a riot, so we can be glad Obama got sun.

You can watch the scene here, starting at about the 0:45 mark. It ends here. (For those concerned with such things: the clips don’t give away the end of the movie, but they’re kind of spoilery.)

the latest headlines

From the teaser for that Atlantic article on the Clinton campaign many people are talking about:

The eight-page blockbuster, “The Front-Runner’s Fall,”

Hmm. Hasn’t that title been used before? Maybe in a “blockbuster” insider article about the failure of a Democratic primary campaign? Like this one?:

In “The Front-Runner’s Fall” in the May 2004 Atlantic, Maslin tells the inside story of the Dean campaign—shedding new light on its failures and its successes.

if at first you do succeed

I kind of hope [Birch] Evan Bayh [III] gets the vice presidential nomination, just to see who comes up with the most embarrassing pun on his name. Actually, like Ari, I don’t. But if he did, I wonder if people would pay attention to his being from a politician family? The Bushes and the Clintons are nationally famous, but there are a fair amount of state and local level families people don’t always know about. See also Christopher John Dodd among others past and present.

Technically: The Clintons and the Bayhs don’t meet the Political Graveyard “three or more politician members” make a family requirement. Unless you’re talking about these Clintons.

subtlety

I don’t know the politics of Ted Turner, but I saw in the listings that this movie was playing on Turner Classic Movies last night. I’d never heard of it before. I’ve still never seen it.