Department of Software Technology
Vienna University of Technology

Description of the Map

Returning to unit (9/11) and taking a look at its other neighbors we find articles T324: Great Britain - ``The Time of the Trollop'' and T337: Great Britain - ``The Lost Leader'' on unit (9/10), again related to the Profumo - Keeler scandal, although this time focusing on the political impact. Further up the map, on unit (9/9) we find article T369 - Great Britain: ``And Then There Were Three'', reporting on Harold Macmillan's speech at the House of Commons and three scandals, including the Profumo - Keeler scandal. (Obviously, with only one article being mapped onto this unit, the quality of data representation is rather high, resulting in a very low input vector quantization error for this unit.) Even further up the row, on unit (9/8) we find two articles T105: Great Britain - ``The Other Harold'', reporting on the election of Harold Wilson as the new leader of the Labour Party against the Tories in the coming elections, and T196: Great Britain - ``Weekend in Washington'' on Harold Wilson's trip to Washington with respect to the upcoming elections. We thus see the topical cluster to cover more general aspects of politics in Great Britain. This shift continues with unit (9/7), covering the death of Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskel and potential follow-ups Harold Wilson and George Brown in article T063 as well as a report on opinion polls on the chances for a Labour government in article T341.

On the next unit up the row, (9/6) , we find a similar topic, but a shift in terms of geography, with article T331: Italy - ``Victory, of sorts, in Sicily'' reporting on elections in Sicily as well as national elections in Italy seven weeks before. We thus now have left the cluster on British politics and moved on to a cluster on Italian politics, with both being part of a larger cluster on politics and elections. This cluster on Italian politics again spreads across several units, covering, for example, coalition debates between Christian Democrat Premier Amintore Fanfani and the Socialist leader Pietro Nenni and the power of the Communist Party.

Again back to unit (9/11) we may continue our exploration of the map in the opposite direction, move down to unit (9/12). There we find article T398: Syria: ``Throwing away the Script'', which reports on an attempt of rebels led by Ex-Colonel Jassem Alwan to overthrow the ruling Baath Party of General Mohamed Hafez. This is the beginning of a cluster on the Middle East, covering the situation in Syria on the neighboring two units, followed by other political issues of the middle east on Egypt, Iraq, Jordania and Tunisia on all units in the lower right corner of the map.

Let us now move to a different topic, namely the political situation in Vietnam in the 1960's. We find article T418: South Viet Nam - ``The Crackdown'' on the religious conflicts in Vietnam to be mapped onto unit (1/14) in the lower left corner of the map, together with articles T390 and T434, all of which are related to Ngo Dinh Diem's crackdown on Buddhist monks. From this unit we may again start to explore the neighboring units to find documents on related topics. The units in the immediate neighborhood all deal more or less directly with the religious conflict in Vietnam, such as, for example, articles T320: South Viet Nam - ``The Religious Crisis'' and T396: South Viet Nam - ``The Buddhist Crisis'' on unit (0/14) to the left. This topic continues on unit (0/13) with articles T363, T334, T414 and T415 reporting on a series of suicides of Buddhist monks to protest against the regime of South Viet Nam's catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem. If we move from unit (1/14) to the right, we again find articles on the conflict in Vietnam, however, this time no more related to Ngh Dinh Diem, but rather to the Vietnam War, the invasion of the Viet Cong and US involvement. It starts with 3 articles ( T518, T533, T559) on the political situation before the actual war on unit (2/14). If we continue to the right, we find on neighboring unit (3/14) a set of 4 articles ( T029, T269, T313, T545) on the fighting in Vietnam. The focus of these articles is - as opposed to the neighboring unit - on troop movements and helicopter fights and missions in Vietnam, thus setting these articles apart from the ones discussed before, while still being part of the general topic on the situation in Vietnam. The exploration of this topic can be continued for one more unit to the right (article T202: South Viet Nam: ``A Wife is only a Wife but Every Red is a Foe'' on unit (4/14)), before reaching the cluster on Middle East politics encountered before on unit (5/14) with articles on the situation in Algeria with its Premier Ben Bella. However, we find more articles on the fighting in Vietnam one row above on units (2/13) - (4/13), next to articles on the religious conflicts on units (0/13) and (1/13) as discussed before. We thus find the cluster of articles on the situation in Vietnam to be represented by 10 units, 4 of which concentrate on the religious conflict, while the remainder is devoted to the Vietnam War.

In order to help us analyze the mappping produced by the we can use the labels automatically extracted by the technique. For example, we find the four units in th elower left corner of the map, i.e. (0/13), (1/13), (0/14), and (1/14), to be labeled with quite similar terms, namely viet, vietname, saigon, diem, dinh, monk, buddha, buddhist, catholic, priest religion, pagoda and so on. These labels clearly describe the topic of the articles on these 4 units, namely the religious conflicts in South Vietnam under the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. The units further to the right, which we already know to describe the war in Vietnam, are labeled with viet, cong, combat, helicopter, saigon, rocket, pilot, fire, troop, guerilla for unit (3/14), or south, vietnam, dinh, diem, viet, cong, geneva for unit (2/13), to pick just a few examples, which also describe this topic in a very accurate way. Please note, that both the fact that all of these units belong to one cluster about Vietnam, as well as the fact that there are two different sub-clusters, namely the religious conflicts and the war, are clear from the resulting labels that were automatically extracted from the 4382-dimensional feature space.

For the first example on British politics, we will take a closer look at units (9/10) and (9/11) in the lower right part of the map. On the latter we find labels like christine, keeler, profumo, ward, ivanov, listing the key players of the Profumo - Keeler scandal, namely Christine Keeler, John Profumo, Stephen Ward and Evgeny Ivanov. More names are provided on the second unit, where the labels christine, keeler, profumo, ward, ivanov, wilson, macmilla, debate, tory, common point at the political perspective of the affair by listing the name of Tory party leader Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson from the Labour party. When analyzing this map, we gradually moved to the left from unit (9/11) to units (8/11) and (7/11), stating, that the topic of the articles on these units gradually shifts from the scandal itself and its political dimension to the more social and moral aspects. This becomes immediately evident, if we take a look at the according labels of the two units. Unit (8/11) is labeled with christine, girl, prostitution, house, scandal, peter, polish, rent, diamond, class. Its neighbor (7/11) is labeled with briton, victorian, society, variety, moral, lecture, obsolete, virgin, sexuality, babylon, thus no longer directly related to the Profumo - Keeler affair, but dealing with the moral of the British society in general. We also noted in the first discussion of these units, that right beneath unit (9/11) the cluster of articles on the Profumo - Keeler affair (and the topic of British politics as such) is finished, and that we find articles on an entirely different topic in the unit below, (9/12). At that time we had to take a closer look at the articles to be able to describe the topic. Using the method we can now immediately identify the topic of the unit by taking a look at its labels, which are given as damascus, coup, baath, nasser, throw, radio, syrian, syria.

The Map