The Final Debate: A Statistical Analysis

Apr 2010

So David Cameron may have come out top in the instant polls, but what do the statistics say?

Well, distribution between the speakers in terms of opportunities were very even. In the BBC transcript (pdf file) Brown and Cameron both produce 34 paragraphs of text, with Clegg only 2 behind, whilst David Dimbleby vigorously maintained control of proceedings, with 81 paragraphs to his name.

It may come as a surprise that ‘tax’ and ‘cut’ were the terms that Brown stuck to very tightly (counts of 55 and 30 respectively). Cameron got in 37 counts of ‘government’ and Clegg went in for ‘money’ and ‘pay’ more than either of his opponents.

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Prime Ministerial Debate… part deux

Apr 2010

Another week, another debate, another textual augmentation from El Mysterioso… After Nick Clegg’s surprise ‘victory’ last week, Brown and Cameron were under pressure to deflect attention from Britain’s new ‘hope’.

‘People’ and ‘country’ were still the most common terms, but ‘money’ and ‘system’ made way for ‘Europe’ and ‘change’. Have a look for yourself here.

The Prime Ministerial Debates Get Augmented

Apr 2010

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.

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‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat…’

Apr 2010

El Mysterioso are proud to announce that we have moved to a nice shiny studio in Hoxton. Ok, maybe it’s not that shiny. But it’s pretty awesome, and finally there’s the extra space we need to expand. World domination will surely follow.

We’ve also been busy working on our new website, and are just finalising the designs. The new site will go live in the coming weeks, but we’ll keep updating this blog in the meantime.