Category: research

  • “A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

    I’m really disturbed (surprised isn’t quite the right word) at what I’m learning about the government’s massive, untargeted surveillance of millions of American citizens over the last 7 years. I thought we had this debate during the Bush administration and all decided it was illegal and should stop. Apparently, folks at the NSA and in…

  • A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Senators: Staring Into The Gaping Ideological Chasm That Divides Congress

    In this post, I’m going to introduce you to a cool-looking graph, tell you what it means, and give the technical details of its generation—all because I think America might care. Here we go. Introduction Politics in America are hopelessly partisan, and all of the bickering serves only to cripple our nation at a moment…

  • Visualizing Texts as Networks

    For a recent project in my text mining class we were required to explore ways of visualizing textual data. This is a tricky problem due to the nature of text, mainly because it is both categorical and sparse. Visualizing numerical data is, relatively speaking, a piece of cake, because real numbers can all be related…