Time for a quick update or two...
+ First off, this blog. For most of the next two weeks, I'll expect to be entirely off the grid. I'm leaving Steamboat Springs early in the AM and heading southwest, all the way to Mesa Verde in the Four Corners. I'll be there for three days, and then head east to pick up G in Colorado Springs before heading back into the Great Sand Dunes for a few days. Then its back to Colorado Springs for a single night before heading into Rocky Mountain National Park for an entire week, the longest stretch I've ever spent in a single National Park.
My original plan for the trip was to do my usual longform Journeys By DJ thing, but after all the time I've spent doing data entry these past two weeks (more on that below), I just don't have it in me. So... instead I'll be tracking my journey through Twitter. From what I hear the iPhone Twitter apps are pretty phenomenal, and what better time to test them out than now? So.... Want to follow along? Now you can.
+ Second, the datamines. I've mentioned them quite a bit the past few weeks, but I don't think I've ever specifically mentioned what I've been doing there.
My original dissertation project was on campaign advertising and the electorate, but as I started working through the details this past winter and spring, I began to have some serious doubts. I still think my original project has merit, maybe even lots of it, but... it would require years worth of effort, and to be honest I'm just not sure I care enough about the topic right now to commit to that kind of effort.
So a few months back I made a switch. Forget TV and focus on blogs. I know... I know... that's where I should have always put my focus, right? Believe me, I've heard it a thousand different times in a hundred different ways. Trust me. It should have been obvious, right? It was obvious, I suppose, only I couldn't see it.
But now that I'm in, I'm all in. My project is going to track the interactions between the political blogosphere and the elite media during the fall election campaign. Using a tool called reBlog, I'll be collecting everything written on over 350 blogs from the first day of the convention until the week after the election. At the same time, I'll also be collecting everything written by 20 elite media sources - NYT, WaPo, CNN, Fox, AP, etc. Then, using a variety of social science network analysis tools, I'll start digging into the data to look for patterns.
But between now and then I'll need your help. I'm looking for two things, primarily. First and foremost, I'm looking for moments in the campaign when information, ideas, and memes cross over from the blogosphere into the elite media. Subtle is good, but I'm hoping for at least a small handful of examples that are somewhat obvious. If I can identify them, I should be able to use my database to track how they emerge and cross over into our elite media system, and if there are enough of them (hope! hope!) I may be able to outline some theories about how, when, and why these breakouts occur.
For those theories to be believable, however, I'll also need to identify how, when, and why these sorts of breakouts do not occur. And that, I suspect, is going to be much more difficult. Every day it seems the blogosphere has a new obsession, and in most cases those obsessions have little to no impact on the outside world. And usually that's as it should be. But every once in awhile the sphere gets its collective hands around something that seems certain to attract major attention, and then..... noting. If I can find identify those moments... if you guys can help me identify those moments.... I just might be able to start putting together a comprehensive description of the way the blogosphere and elite media world interact.
So that's where I am. I've spent the past month doing the hard work of building the feed collector, setting up the databases, normalizing the feeds, and entering all of the data. With the exception of the feeds for the bloggers credentialed for the Republican Convention (what are the folks at the RNC waiting for anyway in making the announcements about who these bloggers are, anyways?) its all ready to go. In a few months I'll have more data than I know what to do with. Needles and haystacks... So if you catch a glint of steel in the sunlight, let me know, OK?
And in the meantime.... Tweet!
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