Categories: Capital Read, Inside the Queensway

Memetracker: Please, please tell me someone is doing something like this up here.

by kadyomalley on Wednesday, July 15, 2009 12:17pm - 30 Comments

It’s downright addictive , especially if you’re one of those people who already loves playing forensic meme0logist, a pastime to which ITQ will cheerfully confess. It would be especially interesting to see the lag times for various media/new media outlets, but my wishlist for a Canadianized version would also track the progress of a story or controversy — like, say, the fracas over the Pride parade fracas — from blogs to aggregators to the (so-called) mainstream media, or vice versa – to see how a story, once broken, ricochets between all three. Heck, why not throw in twitter, what with one of our more technophilic cabinet ministers taking to the tweets to defend a change in government policy? If you really wanted to get ambitious, you could even figure out how often a party-coined catchphrase or talking point makes the leap to genuine meme status, which – ITQ suspects – happens more often than we’d think . Really, the possibilities are endless — fingers crossed that someone out there is already hard at work on it.

Tags: if only ITQ was a coder, language is a virus, memetracker, not actually all that trivial pursuits

More by kadyomalley

Livebloggin Junkie

Interesting thing on the lag times was that a US story/meme peaks in Austrailia.
http://intensedebate.com/people/KadyITQ KadyITQ

You know, the other day someone was doing their best to convince me to spend a lot more time monitoring Australian news sites, since, by virtue of the whole timezone thing, and their primetime being our middle of the night, they tend to be first out with major international news. I kept trying to point out that's when I tend to, you know, sleep, but they were relentless — and this suggests they may have a point.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

The fundamentals of our memes are strong.

http://intensedebate.com/people/KadyITQ KadyITQ

You're just trying to put memestick on a pig.

http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

Sorry, but this meme thing juuuuuuuust won't fly.

http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com bigcitylib

Zach Seward has several interesting theories about this study. One is that the various MSM outlets are deliberately placing themselves at specific places on the upslope/downslope peak–ie "ahead of the curve" or purveyors of conventional wisdom. Another is that once an origonal quote (from a speech say) appears in the MSM, the MSM looks to the blogs as a means of tailoring their own ongoing response to the material in the speech. As though they are assuming that bloggers are a window into the mind of the general electorate.

The study does not, contrary to what it suggests, say much about how much news is being 1st reported in the blogoshere, then makes its way into the MSM, vs. other way around.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/07/how-to-get-ahead…
http://intensedebate.com/people/BCerInToronto BCerInToronto

I'm not sold on the ability of social media, blogs and what have you to break news, they simply lack the resources of professional media organizations. However, when it comes to helping to shape the narrative, that's another story. I think blogs and social media can absolutely influence and help shape the way a story goes and this its media coverage, as well as influence the media into playing-up stories or angles they wouldn't otherwise have.

http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com bigcitylib

A blogger goes to the PCPO convention, blogs that John Tory's aides are there and are telling people that he will indeed run for mayor! Hey presto. A blogger goes through every youtube clip pertaining to Sarah Palin and finds a clip of the leader of an Alaskan seperatist party claiming she is a member. Hey presto.

Chet Champion

trends.google.com is similar to this
Anon

I wish I could find that quote excoriating journalists for paying too much attention to perception as opposed to reality. Not that I'm accusing the present blogger of such a thing, as she does a fair bit of reporting and will, from time to time (as she did with party fundraising) come out strongly in support of common sense.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Ed_Sweeney Ed_Sweeney

[grumbling]
This is the second time I find myself in the very uncomfortable position of complimenting a journalist. That is a fascinating link. Thusly, I begrudgingly present ITQ with a 'Frowning Rex' [a.k.a 'meme2u'] award, for finding inspiration in a sea of the uninspiring.

Excellent site, and like Chet I would expect google to be at the forefront of such a technology. Probably working on the syntax for MML as we speak.
http://www.punditsguide.ca Pundits' Guide

Kady, there is a real issue around how such a project would ever be possible in Canada. Simply put, there is no organization that would finance it, and no viable business model to make it sustainable given the amount of time required to assemble and maintain it.

Most of the Canadian online projects to do with politics are volunteer efforts that occasionally suffer from competing time demands, lack of readily available digestible data, and volunteer burn-out. The media is in no position to underwrite those projects on an on-going basis, and we don't have hardly any (neutral-ish) foundations one could turn to for funding.

DemocraticSpace.com hasn't published a word since December, the UBC Election Stock Market did not function during the last provincial BC election, and the Election Prediction Project did not run during the recent Nova Scotia election. The publishers of both PollingReport.ca and HowdTheyVote.ca have had to take hiatuses in the past to finish school or professional work of some kind (in the latter case, actually receiving hostile emails about it that claimed some kind of partisan motivation).

And the publisher of PunditsGuide.ca is going to have to go back to work full-time very soon (ahem).

If people want to feed their online addictions with Canadian content, this is a problem that's going to have to be solved.

OK, thanks for letting me get that out there. As you were …

http://intensedebate.com/people/M_A_N M_A_N

I think the problem is, in fact, solving itself. As the online hobbyyists start to have to pay mortgages, their labours of love become a sinkhole of time.

So much content online now is so self-referential and clever, you need to spend endless hours online just to get the references. That's a turnoff for folks like me, who like lively discussion but don't have a lot of spare time.

And blogging is an economic model that, just like the newspaper model it borrows from, cannot support more than a very few individuals financially. Bloggers generally rely on ad clicks to make any money at all. There's not that much money to go around, especially of late.

http://www.punditsguide.ca Pundits' Guide

OK, well thanks for the feedback. And sorry to have wasted your time on the database.

http://intensedebate.com/people/M_A_N M_A_N

Actually, I'm sorry if that came across as a bit harsh. Not my intent. I was actually unaware of your database, and was not making any direct reference to it.

I was, in my ham-handed way, suggesting that, eventually, Canadian political online commentary and content will find its own level. I just figure that the survivors will be those that can make a living off the net (very few) and those who can afford not to worry about it (perhaps a larger number).

It's a bit of a mirror to what's happening in the print world. Not saying it's a good thing, just making an observation.

And perhaps, once you return to work, you will find time to continue something of a regular update. You may find that people are quite accepting of less frequent updates if they know when to expect them. Or maybe, I'm just a crotchety old guy who used to work as a newspaper reporter. That could be it, too…

http://intensedebate.com/people/MoneyCityManiac Johnny

I'm hopeful that as the tools get better than the amount of effort to maintain something like PunditsGuide.ca will decrease. Further, that tools will be developed to allow communities to maintain the data (like Wikipedia).

Have you tried finding a sympathetic ear from a University to help provide some funding? I suppose that might be difficult unless researchers at the university itself are contributing.

http://www.punditsguide.ca Pundits' Guide

The reaction I got to informal inquiries with folks during the CPSA conference here was that they would probably want exclusive access to for students and faculty in return for licencing fees. I've been trying to keep it in the public domain, however.

Most of the work in these sites is assembling the data from formats that are not really designed for consumption in that way. Right now I'm working on the older election results, which entails a lot of manual work to get them into a relational database. And I'm also working on properly modelling the financial data for import into the database as well. That and the poll-by-poll results for mapping should just about wrap up the datasets I wanted to include. After that I can add some more programming, querying, and analysis.

I know that the recent XML feed of MPs votes did not include everything that was actually needed by HowdTheyVote.ca (no time on the votes, so you couldn't sort by date reliably, for example), and most of the Elections Canada downloadable financial reports are not consumable as CSV files for a variety of presentation reasons.

Anyways, data is the most time-consuming part of the maintenance. Wikipedia is not designed to support dynamic queries against a relational database, so far as I know. OK, sorry to go on about it. Back to the cool data reports.

http://intensedebate.com/people/KadyITQ KadyITQ

Oh, please don't apologize — it's fascinating, if a little bit disheartening. Not your database, of course, which has become an indispensable resource for journalists, political junkies, academics and probably all kinds of others, but you make a really good point as far as the amount of effort required to create and maintain even a far less complex data tracking project. It seems as though things are a bit better south of the border, which makes me wonder if that might be due to the fact that there are far more think tanks – both impartial and agenda-driven – with sufficient money to pay for it.
http://intensedebate.com/people/MoneyCityManiac Johnny

You're correct that Wikipedia doesn't function like a database, but imagine if we had a database that anyone could edit, with changes that could be easily rolled back when vandalism occurs? That way, you could have readers help you clean up that data and add to it. Google is doing basically this with colaborative spreadsheets to the best of my knowledge.

One can even envision a time when pivot tables, such as the ones you can create in Excel, will be doable from a web interface. Imagine if your audience (such as keen reporters) could slice the data in an interesting way, save the report, and share it with the rest of your viewers?

The tech is not there yet, but that's the idea: one day, you can be Jimmy Wales that provides the infrastructure, guidance, and initial push for the project while your audience (universities, the media, keen citizens) helps manage the workload.

http://www.punditsguide.ca Pundits' Guide

Thing that made me go hmmm.

http://theburdreport.blogspot.com ben burd

Already done it this week on http://theburdreport.blogspot.com when tracking why the MSM didn't pick up on a local story because of the sensitive nature and the fear of offending advertisers
Curtis Brown

Kady,

I am a graduate student in political science (and a blogger and recovering political journalist to boot) doing my research on this issue. And like you, I was fascinated by this study, which really is groundbreaking in that until now, no one has analyzed a dataset so large in order to show how these memes rise and fall within and across the blogosphere and mainstream media outlets.

I am sorry to report that I won't be doing something similar about Canadian blogs and memes – my algorithmic skills, not to mention my computer's data-handling horsepower, are far inferior to what these researchers have at Cornell. But I am doing a more focused content analysis of some Canadian blogs as well as conducting an in-depth survey of bloggers and journalists such as yourself. I do hope that you (as well as other reporters and bloggers who frequent ITQ) will take a few moments to participate when the survey is launched in September. If you want more information, I'd invite you to email me at canadian.blogstudy@gmail.com.

Best,

Curtis Brown
University of Manitoba

http://intensedebate.com/people/KadyITQ KadyITQ

I can't speak for my readers, but I'd love to take part. Please keep me posted!
http://intensedebate.com/people/truemuse truemuse

Can I take part too?

Lets look at the recent meme, Gangrape.

First, I got to Youtube and see Lady Gaga's video, which is a sexualized gang rape where the woman is 'in charge'.
The next time I see the same Meme, (sexualized gang rape), it is here on Maclean's, Lady Gaga shooting stars out of her bra.
I read a book — unrelated to the news cycle — the death of Mata Hari, and a ritualized rape are in the book (Eyewitness to History). Why do those stories stick out for me? Is the the meme?
Then here on Kady's ITQ blog, an accusation of Gang Rape.
Next, on CBC radio, an interview with a pyschiatrist who has studied gang rape by the Red Army against German women at the end of WW11.

Now Professor, what does it all mean?
(I'm sure I know the answer …but just try and tell me!!!)
http://www.intensedebate.com/people/truemuse truemuse

Can I take part too?

Lets look at the recent meme, Gangrape.

First, I went to Youtube and see Lady Gaga's video, which is a sexualized gang rape where the woman is 'in charge'.
The next time I see the same Meme, (sexualized gang rape), it is here on Maclean's, Lady Gaga shooting stars out of her bra. I read a book — unrelated to the news cycle — the death of Mata Hari, and a ritualized rape are in the book (Eyewitness to History). Why do those stories stick out for me? Is the the meme?
Then here on Kady's ITQ blog, an accusation of Gang Rape.
Next, on CBC radio, an interview with a pyschiatrist who has studied gang rape by the Red Army against German women at the end of WW11.

Now Professor, what does it all mean?
(I'm sure I know the answer …but just try and tell me!!!)

Curtis Brown

Great! Send me an email and I'll let you know more.
http://www.punditsguide.ca Pundits' Guide

The other main difference between us and the States is their commitment to open government data. We have a ways to go to catch up, although data is being released here slowly too. It's just not as well organized, from what I can tell.

Looks like the Memeography site you link to has access to a huge database of media sources. Who pays for their access; Cornell, or did they get a grant or what? One could try using the Google API against Google News, I suppose, but if you wanted to look at blogs, I'm not sure how to separate out Canadian blogs from others when everyone is hosted at blogspot.com, for example, so any Google Alerts I have on a Google Blog search return US sources mostly.

Well now I'm just rambling. Thanks for the atta-girl, Kady, and I'll look forward to your new blogpost on this subject.
http://theburdreport.blogspot.com ben burd

How come my post was edited?
Mysterytroy

Have you checked out Raw Signal?
http://rawsignal.com

They're kicking butt in memetracking.