gatewatching

Graham Young has started releasing a polling series measuring the impact of the Rudd Government’s first budget. Graham is On Line Opinion’s founder and chief, and our colleague in the ARC citizen journalism project. But he’s also been pioneering the use of online qualitative polling over an extended period, and lately he’s been testing new tools that analyse his panel’s responses in innovative ways.

Although there’s more to come, Graham’s results so far suggest that the Government got the politics of the budget right. WTPW’s real interest is in its qualitative insights, but the raw numbers show that Swan’s budget was a hit with the Labor base, and has entrenched the sense that Dr Nelson is incompetent, even among Liberal voters. Graham concludes:

This poll was taken before (Nelson’s) address-in-reply so it may have improved after that. However, what it says is that while the budget didn’t win Rudd any votes, it lost Nelson some. You’ll have to wait for the qual to find out why, but my strong suspicion would be that it is to do with his performance.

In the first batch of qual, Graham analyses what the panel said they approved of in the budget, and uses lexical analysis software Leximancer to pull out the main threads, or “concepts”, in their responses.

Read more…

Graham Young budget, Glenn Milne, Graham Young, Kevin Rudd, Leximancer, polling, Possum Comitatus, Wayne Swan, What the People Want

Good news! Our University has purchased a site license for Leximancer, and we’ll be making extensive use of it in our research on the Australian blogosphere.

The blurb from the website gives a pretty neat summary of what Leximancer does:

Leximancer is a software tool that enables users to find meaning from text-based documents. It automatically identifies key themes, concepts and ideas from unstructured text with little or no guidance. The innovative concept map allows users to interact with the analysis – navigating the true meaning of the text.

Of course, there are other ways to find “meaning” in text, but the application for it in studying the blogosphere is in finding out whether particular bloggers have concepts or themes that they return to over time, and whether that’s matched by the comments threads.

I imagine bloggers themselves might be interested in seeing the results of this kind of analysis of their blogs - we might issue a call for dump files soon when we’re more expert users.

Leximancer itself is an interesting example of research commercialisation - it began its life over at UQ as applied IT research, and now its a commercial venture.

Anyway, its bound to be a fun toy to play with - the first thing we’ll do is analyse our own project, youdecide2007, to see which concepts and themes recur most frequently.

blogging blogging, Leximancer, research, youdecide2007