Hi all,

I’m getting started on my next personal project: Text mining. I first got introduced to the concept by Alisha Holland, who’s a fellow (and soon to be professor at Princeton) that I did some research assistant work for. She mentioned her next project was doing some textual analysis of the political platform of parties in Latin America. I looked it up, and it’s some pretty interesting stuff.

The problem is, I don’t know anything about it.

So. Here’s the deal. I got access to some Islamic State documents – their handbooks, propaganda pamphlets, magazines, etc. Having read some of it, I think there’s some very interesting insights to be had about the nature of the Islamic State’s propaganda that I think is being missed out on right now (more on that later). But I’ll try my hand at some text mining of Islamic State documents and post the results here — we’ll see how it goes.