First Pass at Palin Emails by Opani

by DrJ • 15 years ago

11 3 15 years ago

Awesome work, but I find it strange that all of the emails in the example post are @yahoo.com.

alphaG77• 15 years ago

This has been explained in the news by a number of journalists -- I believe it is because, Palin used her yahoo email account to discuss "off-the-record" thoughts with various members of her administrative staff. However, her dumb ass didn't realize that by sending from a yahoo account to staff email accounts, makes those received emails subpoena-able for public review. So the folks requesting the release of email records, were also able to get inbound email records from staffers received from Palin's yahoo as well as emails sent from staffer personal email accounts that were inbound to Palin's non-personal account. What is missing from the entire data set would be emails from Palin's yahoo account to staff personal accounts and vice versa.

As one journalist I saw on the news discussing this issue, what's interesting is the stuff that falls between the lines, i.e. redacted or missing from certain conversations that might be referred to.

onecreativenerd• 15 years ago

Here's a first pass at auto-discovering topics in that text using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) in R: http://opani.com/ryan/sarah-palin-email-topics/148845806827/

The biggest deficiency now is the stopwords list is not working 100% so mundane topics are creeping in. I'll have limited time to play with it in the next few days, so feel free to make some cool discoveries. :)

First Pass at Palin Emails by Opani

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