Analysing political discourse

The only thing more depressing than the actual TV ‘debate’ between Clegg, Brown and Cameron is the brain-dead mainstream media ‘follow-up’ this morning. (You know the pattern: get a few randomly-selected ‘ordinary’ people and ask them what they thought about the debate. Zzzz…) So it was encouraging to find that one of my OU colleagues, Simon Buckingham-Shum (who has done a lot of work on visualising discourse and reasoning using tools like Compendium) had done a cognitive mapping of last night’s discussion. You can find his interactive map here. He also has a blog post about it. Great stuff.

LATER: The Google Blog has an interesting post about what Brits searched for during the debate. Includes this chart: