One of our most popular products is something we call a Conversation Capture. A Conversation Capture is an analysis of the entire blog-based discourse related to a particular subject. Our more advanced products are generally built with the intention of doing comparative analyses between, say, issues or brands or product features/benefits. For a Conversation Capture, we just take a single key concept and look at the discourse related to it in the blogs.

As a followup to our look at the Obama-McCain contest that we published in August, we decided to use this straightforward approach to take a look at a day of blog posts about Sarah Palin.

We built the dataset using posts from Monday, October 20 (840 posts total). This was the Monday following Palin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. Our assumption going in was that the discussion about that would completely dominate.

What we found, however, was very interesting:

Conversation Capture - Sarah Palin - Oct 20

As you can see in the Lexical Map, there was a large discussion about SNL, but there was also a very large discussion about an interview Palin gave with the Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she discussed a Constitutional Amendment that would prevent states from recognizing Gay marriage, among other things. In addition, a lot of attention was given to a speech that Jon Stewart gave in Boston.

Even more interesting, though, was the cluster related to the way Alaska’s oil revenues are distributed. By the end of last week there was quite a bit of discussion about the hypocrisy of Palin’s attacks on Obama as a socialist and Alaska’s oil revenue policies - but here we see that even on that Monday, the issue was clearly emerging in the blogosphere.

One of the other tools we like to use for our Conversation Capture is to build a list of word co-occurrences. Here is a sample excerpt:

Co-Occ

We see here as well that although the word “socialist” does appear often, it was not only used in the context of a description of her attacks on Obama but also related to the oil revenue situation in Alaska. As well, it is clear that her position on gay marriage is significant - more significant than Joe the Plumber, for sure.

With the US Political Convention season in full swing, we thought we’d present a short demonstration of how Exvisu’s blogosphere analysis can shed light on the discourse related to political campaigns, candidates, and issues. In mid-July, we performed an analysis of the English blogosphere related to the upcoming US Presidential election. We focused specifically on Free Trade and NAFTA, which became a key issue during Primary season.

The following map was generated using a dataset including all blog posts (there were 946 total posts after filtering for spam) for a structured series of queries between July 14 and July 18. We then performed a lexical analysis that identified and mapped the relationship between the top 150 words in the dataset.

Obama - McCain - NAFTA

Observations

• McCain and Obama are both located at the center of the map - which is to be expected, since these were used as keywords to establish the dataset. All of the words on the map are arranged by their relationship to their nearest 5 other nodes (words), and the relative size of each node is directly proportional to its resonance in the dataset.
• When performing such an analysis, words that appear on the map tend to self-organize into clusters that define concepts that are important. In this case, there were 6 significant conceptual clusters related to important events of that week: Gov. Mark Sanford’s gaffe in an interview on CNN; Michigan speeches by both Obama and McCain; McCain’s speech at the La Raza Convention; issues related to free trade and trade agreements; the “flip-flop” question, and general political and social issues that are at play during the election season.
• In terms of positives for McCain during that week, the strong cluster related to his speech at La Raza is particularly interesting. In this speech, McCain was quoted as saying that he’s an “unapologetic supporter” of free trade. “Unapologetic” and “supporter” are the words which connected this cluster with the general free trade cluster to its left (and this connection is largely responsible for their proximity on the map). That is not to say that this declaration is the only thing in play for McCain on this issue - as we read the blog posts that make up the free trade cluster, we noticed that the controversy surrounding McCain’s trip to Ottawa in June was still very evident in the text.
• The other negative cluster related to McCain was related to Sanford’s inability to distinguish specific ways that McCain’s economic policy proposals differed from those of Bush in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. One of the important innovations of this kind of lexical analysis is that it allows us to identify which stories resonate the most in a given period of time, and the fact that a single story related to a single on-air interview by a McCain surrogate even appears on this graph demonstrates the influence that even a small problem can have once it’s picked up in the blogs.
• It’s also interesting to note the other individuals who appear among the top 150 words on the map. Other than Obama and McCain, we also see the following people: Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Phil Gramm, Austan Goolsbee, and Sanford.
  • Gramm, the former McCain Campaign co-chair, was in the news due to his assertion that America had “become a nation of whiners” following which he resigned his position in the campaign. His name is directly connected to the words “nation,” “political,” “economic,” and “advisor.”
  • Austan Goolsbee is Obama’s key economic advisor and appears because he is widely cited by bloggers that take a close look at Obama’s economic and trade policies.
  • The fact that both Clintons appear among the top 150 words in the map is an indication of the importance they still wield related to this year’s election cycle.
• The last cluster to note is related to the “flip-flop” question. This is a relatively small cluster but contains words directly related to Obama including “fisa” and “public finance.” At the time of this analysis, this question was still very much alive.

As the election draws closer we’ll perform at least one additional analysis of this kind that will allow us to see how these issues have developed since mid-July. Feel free to ask questions or note any additional trends in the comments.