Wikileaks / 14.200 cables

Team Members

Lonneke, Bernhard, Esther, Catalina (Cameran) (Michael)

Introduction

Claims

To do: Look up and list some of the core claims

- made by Assange

- about the strategic timing of leaks

- geography of cables

Method as intervention (i.e. journalistic)

- journalistic framing through engines: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/06/12/239259/How-Journalists-Data-Mined-the-Wikileaks-Docs

- wikileaks impacts search engine optimization: http://www.seo-theory.com/2010/12/08/how-the-wikileaks-scandal-impacts-search-engine-optimization/

(don't know whether they belong here or under the claims...)

To do

Includes listing and analysing related projects (i.e. engines, visualizations made with the cables).

http://cablesearch.org/

http://www.sputtr.com/leakysearch/

Research Question

Meta question: How to make sense of the content of the Big Data Wikileaks cables?

Does the timing of the release date of cables suport the claim that the cables are strategically leaked for highest impact in current events?

Is it true that the cables are released in geographical batches? Or topic batches?

If so, what are the issues addressed in these cables and do they resonate online?

How do the cables render visible different geographies of countries that are referenced together?

Steps in Method

Data categories in the Cables:

Time: 1. Time of the leak 2. Creation date of cable

Geography: 1. Cities of from/to/cc'ed embassies 2. TAGS (countries)

TAGS: 1. Subject tags 2. Country tags 3. Program tags 4. Organization tags 5. Embassadies and Consulates 6. Unknown or self-descriptive tags

Classification

Leaks per day (height by nr of results in Yahoo x cables released that day)

Peaks in Twitter activity

Correlate release date of leaks with activity peaks on Twitter during the Arab revolutions.

Findings

.........

Worldmap leaks per embassy: Expresses embassies, node size; number of leaks, color; resonance on yahoo

Co-word analyis subject tags

Co-word analysis Program tags

Co-occurence Country tags geospatial: Size= number of leaks; colour = degree

Co-occurence Country tags

Conclusion

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This project is part of the DmiSummer2011Projects *