The Prime Ministerial Debates Get Augmented
Time for the first El Mysterioso studio project: using ‘augmented textuality’ and rhythm analysis to decipher the rhetoric in the General Election leadership debates.
We have indexed the most frequently used terms, and you can click on the most popular ones to map their occurrence in the transcript using bezier curves (rendered on an HTML5 canvas underneath the body of the text). The control points of the curves pull towards each new utterance of the top terms (at the moment, the control is not mapped to any mathematical formulation of gravity. Feel free to get in touch if you have ideas about that).
Have a look at it here.
Our initial idea takes the lead from Anil Bawa Cavia’s ‘augmented textuality‘ experiment. We decided to push his ideas further by mapping out a linkage between key terms in a document using web-native technology. The concept is inspired by the term ‘hyperlink’ (and what it might offer us as consumers of text), Bruce Sterling and Lorraine Wild, Lefebvre’s concept of nested rhythms and, naturally, the rhetoric of our politicians.
Clicking terms in the information panel will show a breakdown of words used most frequently by each of the speakers. Brown hammers home ‘education’ and ‘give’. ‘Tax’ gets heavy usage by Clegg and Cameron whilst being almost completely avoided by Brown. ‘Money’ is spoken mostly by Cameron, yet ‘economy’ is pushed hard by Brown. ‘System’ is Clegg’s word of choice, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the top-heavy representation for the lead party under the UK’s ‘first past the post’ voting system.
We’ll be publishing versions of each of the debates, and making some enhancements to the augmentations as we think about how to make it more useful for readers. Multiple beziers, overview navigation, data visualisation, stop it bricking mobile webkit – we have plenty to implement. But phrases might be a good place to start: ‘people in this country’ would surely come high up the list, perhaps alongside ‘broken Britain’ and – just about – ‘broken parliament’?
The full transcript from last week’s debates is available from the BBC here.
This post is almost certainly Nick Clegg’s fault.