A year ago, I dabbled with word clouds to see what headlines about emerging markets might reveal. Doing the same exercise for every quarter since 2006 shows some interesting trends, particularly in 2007 and 2008, where the importance of topics such as risk, growth and crisis changes over time. Early evidence from 2009 suggests – optimistically? – that the overall news from emerging markets now is quite similar to 2006!
There seems to be a bit of traffic to and through this blog, looking for word clouds of and/or commentary on President-elect Obama’s acceptance speech in Chicago. Given that until now there was nothing on that topic, I have a feeling they left relatively empty-handed. Let me fix that now, with a quick zip through [...]
OK, my blog titles are getting worse not better! Welcome, nonetheless, to another Irish genealogy post.
Earlier this week, I was contacted by my fourth cousin, Stephen Macken. Like myself, Stephen runs a family tree website on myheritage.com. Stephen worked out, through the SmartMatch system, that we share a set of great-great-great-grandparents. Thomas Boyd, whose first [...]
Hot on the heels of last week’s word cloud for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, I’m delighted to be able to do the same for John McCain’s acceptance speech. The word cloud is below and as you can see some old reliables crop up: country is more important than world, Washington gets a bit of a [...]
The pre-speech favourite would no doubt have been “change”. Some thought it would be George Bush. Others John McCain, or Iraq. Others again thought it would actually be the economy, stupid – or something related, like jobs. Some commentators were speculating about Martin Luther King, given the date of the acceptance speech. Admittedly, very few [...]
The Irish Family History Foundation has started to put online its researchers’ work on the earliest complete Irish Censuses – those of 1901 and 1911. (Permit me to digress and lament the various circumstances, from bizarre mid-Great War bureaucratic decisions to Irish Civil war tactics, that led to the destruction of the 1821-1891 Irish censuses, [...]
Having recently discovered the fantastic word-cloud abilities of wordle.net, I decided to play around with it. I took the top 500 stories on Google News, for the term ‘Emerging Markets’, from June 2008. I had to make quite a few adjustments to take out names of newspapers etc., and the cleaning still isn’t complete, but [...]
