Acronym

Building on Jason’s excellent post yesterday on "Crunching the Numbers," we’ve been experimenting with using ManyEyes to analyze the content in Associations Now. I’ve only just started playing with it, but so far it’s been interesting.

A tag cloud shows me that some of the most commonly used words in our August-October 2007 issues (other than the obvious “association” derivatives) include “board,” “member” and its derivatives, “open,” “leader” and “leaders,” “questions,” “information,” “power,” and “responsibility.” I’m comfortable with that (although I think the word “responsibility” was somewhat skewed by our social responsibility coverage in the September issue).

Word trees are fun to play with, too; you enter a word or phrase and you can trace its uses in their immediate context. For instance, in August-October 2007, our authors talked about how associations are …

- "much more influential with the political sector than the economic one"
- "starting to look more and more like businesses serving a consumer niche"
- "obviously different from public companies in important ways"
- "going to experience higher membership growth"
- "heavily invested in maintaining their prominence and influence"
- "capable of addressing the practical needs of individual members"
- "pretty good at managing internal issues"

We’re going to continue to upload data until I have a year’s worth of issues up there, just to see what we can see. And of course, since ManyEyes makes all data publicly accessible, you can work with the data sets as well—search for “associations” under data sets. Are there other analyses that might be worth doing? Ideas are welcome!