New UCI website decodes political messages
September 3rd, 2008, 3:00 am · 5 Comments · posted by Gary Robbins, science writer-editor
UC Irvine researchers say they’ve created a website that quickly figures out the true meaning of metaphors used in such influential political blogs as Daily Kos, Instapundit, the Huffington Post and OC Blog-Red County.
MetaViz.org is meant to “foster critical thinking, to encourage people to look not only at what is being said on blogs by the words themselves, but between and behind the words,” UCI graduate student Eric Baumer says in a news release.
Baumer created the “metaphor analyzer” with informatics professor Bill Tomlinson and with Jordan Sinclair, an undergraduate.
The researchers say, for example, that when the word “religion” is used on the leftist blog thingprogress.org, the author is sometimes using it as a metaphor for the word “attack.” (Go to MetaViz.org for analysis of blogs across the political spectrum.)
In the news release, the researchers say metaViz “works by mining data from the website Wikipedia — a large and mostly non-metaphorical source of text — to find common groups of nouns that are characteristic of certain concepts, or ‘domains,’ such as military, sports, or parenting.
“It then analyzes the Wikipedia text for verbs that tend to be associated with those nouns. Finally, it looks at various political blogs, and determines which groups of nouns tend to be found with verbs extracted from Wikipedia. The groups of nouns from the blog and from Wikipedia are displayed next to each other, grouped by frequency, as a way of showing how the word usage in the blog tends to map onto the Wikipedia usage.”
Note to readers: I gave metaViz a test drive. It can be as confusing as UCI’s explanation of how it works.
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September 3rd, 2008 at 12:11 pm
funny
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:11 pm
This article/blog does not do the project much justice. A note on the note: a good writer will do his/her best to make sense of what has been said, and not just put in a quote without effort to understand it.
September 4th, 2008 at 10:11 am
very cool and interesting concept… as a computer science grad and someone watching the election closely and who has an interest in rhetoric and language this interests me a lot.
I hope they will continue to update and enhance their tool and website throughout the presidential campaign and beyond.
I’d also love to see what things like the Daily Show are spewing. I suppose that might have to rely on some transcripts or other sources to try to accompish this.
Dude: Hi. Did you test drive metzViz? I thought it was very interesting, but some of the functions should be easier to use.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
These people have altogether too much time on their hands. They should be doing something useful — like growing potatoes, maybe?
Or washing windows?
We seem to have become a nation of hypochondriacs, taking our temperaure for this or that and measuring this and the other every time we turn around, and it is mostly stuff our grandmothers told us from just plain common sense. Only it’s not so common anymore.