SAM Soundtrack: The Simpsons -- A Capella! (YouTube via Neatorama)

Whether you like The Simpsons or not, you have to be impressed with this little bit of a cappella artistry...

Intelligence And Art (Link List)

Wired magazine recently highlighted Kryptos, the James Sanborn sculpture sitting in the middle of the CIA (see the image on the right). While most intel professionals are very familiar with the story behind Kryptos, the article got me thinking again about intelligence and art.

I don't mean to suggest anything as highbrow as "intelligence art" and certainly am not talking about the largely meaningless discussions that tend to revolve around the question "Is intelligence an art or a science?"

I mean the resonance I feel with a certain piece of art when I look at it and contemplate the profession I study.

Probably the most direct example of this is the work of Mark Lombardi. Lombardi is famous for his hand-drawn link diagrams of real events and supposed connections (see the image on the left). It is hard to look at his pieces and not sense that, at least for a while, you have been walking the same path together.

He reportedly committed suicide due to the depression and anger he felt after one of his creations was destroyed when the sprinkler system unexpectedly went off in his apartment (a sentiment shared by any Mercyhurst students who have ever lost their link diagram to a bad flash drive or a computer crash...).

Similar in some ways to the work of Lombardi are the intricate and wholly abstract three dimensional artworks of Janice Caswell. I love the way her work flows across walls and corners. It is almost as if she has developed an intricate analysis of all of the connections represented by some real world event and then removed the names of all of the actors and actions.

Her work (see an example on the right) goes directly to a point I try to teach my students, though. We tend to hyperfocus on the facts and assumptions and logic -- the hard data -- inherent in whatever we are attempting to analyze.

Whenever we try to visualize that information and analysis, however, we are also tapping into the nonlinear and largely inarticulate parts of our brains. Why did you put that in the center of your diagram? Why is his picture so large? Most of the connections seem to go around the sides of your nodes. Is that significant? Caswell validates, for me, the potential importance of listening to that subconscious voice, to try to hear what the quiet parts of my brain are trying to tell me.

(By the way, if you like Caswell's art as much as I do, you should check out the 57 other artists featured at VisualComplexity.com).

Another artist whose sculptural art echoes some of my own emotions when working on intelligence products are the paper-cut models of Jen Stark. These are really quite amazing constructions using nothing more than colored paper, patience and enormous creativity. I think I find them appealing because of the intricate layering and the odd angles and turns her works take (see an example to the left).

The relationship of the last two artists, Paula Scher and Timothy Hutchings, to intel is easy to see -- its geographic. Scher, who I first saw at The Serious Play Conference last year, does these magnificent renderings of geography that are both very close and very distant to what it is that I study. To get a sense of this tension, I suggest that you take a look at some of the closeups of her work (see the map of South America on the right).

Hutchings, on the other hand, does many different things with all sorts of materials (much of it abstract). The parts of his work that draw me closest, however, are the very familiar terrain tables (see an example below) he builds. It is hard to imagine, for most old Army guys like me, that the humble terrain table can be a work of art but Hutchings, in my mind, has done just that.

How about you? Is there anything or anyone's art you look at and think, "That feels like my job?" If so, post it to the comments...

Cool Chart, Cool Charting Program (VisibleCertainty.com)

Verifiable.com is a new-ish online tool for visualizing data. The chart below is an example of how their product works (while making a fairly thought provoking point at the same time). The chart is interactive -- mouse over the points to see the data in detail.

Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools To Do Intel Analysis (Original Research)

In my Advanced Analytic Techniques class this term, we have been taking a quick look at a number of different intel analysis methods (with the results posted on our ADVAT blog) but we have also been examining some methods in a bit more detail.

One of the more interesting experiments was Jeff Welgan's attempt to do competitive intelligence analysis using free, online search engine optimization tools. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), for those of you new to the term, is basically about trying to make your website, blog, etc. easier to find.

Jeff noticed that there are many, many tools to help people do this on the cheap. His thought was that you could use these tools not to aid your own efforts but rather to gather data about a competitor company, organization or even a terrorist group through their web presence. This, in turn, might allow an analyst to gain insight into their strategies and, possibly, their next moves.

For his purposes, he focused on two competitors, Starbucks and Caribou Coffee for his case study. His site, however contains a good bit more data, however. He has included basic background material on SEO, a list of operational definitions, a fairly comprehensive list of online tools, and a concise section on how-to use these tools as an intelligence method.

I think Jeff would be the first to admit that relying on SEO analysis exclusively is kind of like relying on HUMINT exclusively when you have SIGINT and IMINT as well. That said, this approach certainly has the potential to add a rich, structured source of data to bounce off the anecdotal and unstructured stuff that makes up most of what is available to the intel analyst.