Never underestimate the ability of American academics to transform a perceived crisis into a grant writing opportunity:

A consortium of major universities, with Homeland Security Department funds, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

The "sentiment analysis" is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.

Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush's use of the term "axis of evil," the handling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.

American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.

The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look "to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information that might be indicative of potential threats to the nation," a statement by the department said.

It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be put in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to U.S. news, Kielman said.

"We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate," he said.

Naturally, Lucy Dalglish, who never quite recognized that Judith Miller was a propagandist disquised as a journalist, is fearful of what is essentially an academic featherbedding opportunity:

Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.

“It is just creepy and Orwellian,” said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Clearly, this is a situation that qualifies more for a Golden Fleece award than it does the intervention of the ACLU. Sentiment analysis appears to be a skillful academic entrepreneurial effort to cross deconstruction with the war on terror and create a research money tree:

In contemporary philosophy and social sciences, the term deconstruction denotes a process by which the texts and languages of (particularly) Western philosophy appear to shift and complicate in meaning when subjected to the textual readings of deconstruction. Jacques Derrida coined the term in the 1960s, and found that he could talk more readily about what deconstruction was not that about what it was, most especially in reply to questions posed by others about it. The problem was that deconstruction attempts to alter the ordinary understanding of what reading and method mean. One could say then that it is not a "method" in the sense of that word prior to deconstruction.

Subjects relevant to deconstruction include the philosophy of meaning in Western thought, and the ways that meaning is constructed by Western writers, texts, and readers and understood by readers. Though Derrida himself denied deconstruction was a method or school of philosophy, or indeed anything outside of reading the text itself, the term has been used by others to describe Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism, which involved discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlying—and unspoken and implicit—assumptions, ideas, and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief, for example, in complicating the ordinary division made between nature and culture.

A research project created for the purpose of encoding Derrida in endless variations within software so as to differentiate between people who dislike the US from those who excoriate it, and hence, bringing Baudrillard off the bench, identify possible threats. And, once the threat is identified? Time to consume the magical 'he-man' elixier created by The Nutty Professor? Or, perhaps, because the threat is written or verbal, it can be effectively resisted through a written or verbally abusive response?

As with deconstruction itself, the inquiry appears to generate more questions than answers, even more ideal from the research perspective, because, as one of the participants breathlessly informs us:

“There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government,” Professor Wiebe said. “But it doesn’t mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world.”

Personally, I think that it is more likely to generate results not markedly superior to Bushinator v1.0.

Labels: American Empire, Postmodernism