Let Freedom Blog! Chinese Dissidents Write Backwards To Beat Government Filters (WSJ via Digital Inspiration)

Great article in the Wall Street Journal recently about recent rioting on southern China and how Chinese bloggers are defeating internet censorship, in one case, by using a simple widget that lets them write backwards. The text is still readable but the automatic filters set up by the government don't recognize it (The WSJ has a paywall so if you want to see the full article, take a look at it soon. Digital Inspiration has a summary and some additional links).

Automatic Text Analysis Tools (Digital Inspiration)

The blog Digital Inspiration has done some recent posts on automated text analysis tools. These tools allow the analyst to do simple word frequency counts and gather other statistics from documents. If you looked at Rachel Kesselman's thesis on word usage in historical NIEs, you know that you can get some pretty sophisticated results from these tools. Here are a couple that would be useful for some fast and simple analytic tasks.

Text Content Analysis Tool
Wordle (If you need to make the analysis visually appealling)

If I were going to use this in a classroom exercise, I would try to get two different speeches from the same person to compare. For example, I had one student use these types of tools to analyze the kinds of words Vladimir Putin used to talk about similar topics to his domestic audience and to the international community. Very interesting stuff!

Resource Round-Up (Link List)

Here are a couple of interesting or useful sites I have run across over the past week...

Finding Information On The Internet: A Tutorial. UCal Berkeley librarians, I love you! This tutorial is fantastic! It is a great resource for OSINTers and intel studies students.

Priority Planning Model And Worksheet. There are two kinds of people in the world: Those that use priority-planning-model-worksheets and those that don't. If you are of the first persuasion, you probably already have your own system. If you are of the second, you will read this post, commit to getting yourself organized, download the template, half-way fill it out and then lose it on the way to somewhere. Which means the main reason to click on this link is for all the other tips that Ian's Messy Desk has to offer including brief tips on 9 Key Steps For Preparing A Speech or How To Build Your Self-Confidence...

Email Based File Conversion. Converting documents from one format to another can be a pain, particularly when you are on the road. Digital Inspiration lists a number of services that will take your document or audio file, convert it and then send it back to you in another format. I have not tried these services out yet so if any of you have any experience with them (good or bad) please post it to the comments.