war (Hits: 1313)

Dr ElBaradei told Mr Blair that: “Any war would risk radicalising the region. It should be UN-controlled.” 

Extract from meeting in 2003 – Meetings with Dr Blix and Dr ElBaradei 6 February 2003

What follows are the visualizations created using Leximancer software of the Iraq Inquiry Report (all 12 Volumes over 2 million words)and also referred to as the Chilcot Report. The Report of the Iraq Inquiry was published on Wednesday 6 July 2016. Sir John Chilcot’s public statement can be read here.

Leximancer is a computer software that conducts quantitative content analysis using a machine learning technique. It learns what the main concepts are in a text and how they relate to each other. It conducts a thematic analysis and a relational (or semantic) analysis of the textual data. Leximancer provides word frequency counts and co-occurrence counts of concepts present in the tweets. It is:

[A] Method for transforming lexical co-occurrence information from natural language into semantic patterns in an unsupervised manner. It employs two stages of co-occurrence information extraction— semantic and relational—using a different algorithm for each stage. The algorithms used are statistical, but they employ nonlinear dynamics and machine learning. (Smith and Humphreys, p. 26)

Once a concept has been identified by the machine learning process, Leximancer then creates a thesaurus of words that are associated with that concept giving the ‘concept its semantic or definitional content’.

Iraq Inquiry Report Social Network Visualisation – by Dr Steven McDermott

How to read the Leximancer Map

A Leximancer ‘Theme’ is a group or cluster of Concepts that have some commonality or connectedness as seen from their close proximity on the Concept Map. The size of the Theme circle has no bearing as to its prevalence or importance in the text; the circles are merely boundaries. Prevalence is determined by the number of Concepts present in the Theme and this is indicated in the Thematic Report. The histogram bars in the Thematic Report are color-coded (hot – cold) to further signify the prevalence of the Theme – and this color is carried through to the Theme circle boundary color.  (Source: Link)

Thematic Summary of Iraq Inquiry Report 2016a

Thematic summary of Iraq Inquiry Report 2016 in full as pdf file.

attacks (Hits: 1458)
“Once Saddam is gone there is likely to be widespread and apparently random violence between Iraqis. Specific attacks against Coalition Forces are likely to come later (perhaps some months later) if particular individuals or groups feel they are being cut out of contracts, administration positions etc.”