Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Posted at Amy Gahran's Poynter blog, commenting on a post about Many Eyes. (I lost concentration somewhere through this...)

The visualization of "problems" mostly shows, I think, that the reports are written in such unclear, fuzzy, let's-not-talk-about-what's-really-happening language that no visualization or linguistic tool will get much information out of it.

Every branch off every word seems to peter off into meaningless phrases.

In trying other words, there were just two hits for "mistakes", and none for "oops" ;-)

(Searching for "because of the" was a bit more useful. I can't find how to make my own deep links to visualizations using Amy's dataset.)

Of course, there has been a radical (root) analysis of the invasion of Iraq from the beginning which argues that looking at problems, mistakes, and what went wrong is prejudicing the question.

Certain people are getting extremely, obscenely rich, and certain people are staying in power.

That these are the same people who have a great deal to do with the problems suggests that what is a problem (looting of U.S. government funds, theft of Iraqi natural resource wealth, deaths of a million or so and displacement of millions more) depends very much on one's perspective.

Even with these documents, the few results for "chose" and "decided" are a bit more informative than more passive constructions, although it's telling that the report grants the insurgency a great deal of agency in deciding how the occupation is going.