ResearchBuzz

William F. Buckley died this week. I knew that he hosted Firing Line, but I did not know that Stanford University had a database of Firing Line TV shows. The show ran from 1966 to 1999, and there were just over 1504 episodes of the program.

The database, at http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/programList.php, appears to list something over 1200 episodes (and a couple of related specials.) They’re presented in a table which includes episode number, name, and two columns that show whether the first five minutes are available as streaming media, and whether the whole show is available and in what format (the only available format I saw was VHS.)

If you click on the name of the program you’ll get other information including the list of guests, taping date, duration, a summary of the program, and whether a copy of it is available. If you want to look at the first five minutes of a show (I would say less than ten percent of the shows listed have the first five minutes available as streaming media) you’ll need to have the RealOne video player.

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, which hosts the site at Stanford, is asking for suggestions on what shows to digitize and make available online. You can get more information on the database at http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/index.php .

I can’t believe I’m writing this in August 2007, but if you’re busy thinking about November 2008 you’ll have lots of fun over at Wonkosphere ( http://wonkosphere.com ), a site which is tracking buzz on the major presidential candidates. (I saw only Republican and Democratic candidates represented.)

The site tracks with a graph the candidates and their level of buzz in the blogosphere. It also pulls out particular posts and provides stats for chatter in different sections of the ’sphere — conservative, liberal, and neutral. Dennis Kucinich, clocking in at number 10 on the list of 12, has a list of recent blog posts mentioning him and the tone among liberal and conservative blogs (Tone measures how positive the content of the blog postings was.) (Why not list the tone among politically-neutral blogs? In some ways I would find that the most interesting stat.)

Each candidate, as you might expect, also has their own page. Here is John McCain’s page. Graphs show buzz and tone over time (with a comparison to the candidates overall) and a list shows the most recent blog posts dealing with the candidate. And here’s where there might be a slight problem. On McCain’s page (and several other candidate pages) there are a lot of stories about Larry Craig. I don’t know if that’s because there are brief candidate mentions, or if because there’s been such a huge amount of coverage of that particular story so quickly, but they have very little to do with the candidates in whose lists they are appearing.

I found I got more out of the blog posts when it was very obvious (via the headline) that they were about a particular candidate, or about a particular issue that candidate was known for. I got the data and the current discussion points from there and relied on the graphs for an overview on where the candidate is buzzwise.

If you’re wondering exactly what blogs are being mined for this data, you can get a breakdown at http://wonkosphere.com/directory.htm . There are something over 1200 blogs here. I was very surprised at how many more conservative (over 700) blogs there were compared to liberal (just over 400.) There were a tiny number (45) of independent blogs.

Despite the fact that the hype machine is gassing up and pulling out onto the highway, the elections are still over a year away, and because of that news political coverage is still unformed, speculating about possible presidential candidates (even longshots), focusing on the current administration, and getting easily distracted by scandal. That makes Wonkosphere’s job tough. I expect as we get closer to the election, narrow down the candidates, etc, the buzz reporting and post lists will get a lot better. Worth a look.

If you’re looking for something pithy to toss into your next dinner party, look not further than the over 40,000 quotes available at PoliticalQuotes (http://www.politicalquotes.org/), a collection of quotes by and about historians, politicians, and suchlike (over 12,000 people are quoted.)

The front page has both a simple search (bottom) and a field-based search (right.) I did a simple search for furious. I got 8 results showing part of the quote, who said it, and its popularity index and document number. Quotes in that search ranged from Queen Victoria to Henry Clay to Muammar Qaddafi. I was a bit confused because some of the results didn’t have my search word in them, but when I clicked on one of the results I saw why.

Each quote has a page of context that does with it. The Clay quote, for example, contained information about the context of the quote (in which my keyword was found) a place for related quotes (none in this case), a picture of Clay, very basic information about him, and major context and keywords. I would have liked to see just a little more hookups to information (external links to Wikipedia? Ask? Y!Q? Answers.com?) but I was impressed by this elegant context page. It also made it clearer why there was an advanced/fields search on every page (in case you really did want your keyword only in the quote itself, and not in the context.

The site is apparently in beta; I don’t know what that means for a quotes database but it’s well worth a look right now.