What leads to applause?

Geplaatst op 14-04-2010 door Maarten Marx | trivia | tags: |

People keep on asking us what the use is of all that parliamentary data in XML. Easy! There are so many applications. Consider the following: one can learn how to write good speeches.
Everyone wants to receive applause, so we created a query which collects all paragraphs after which the audience starts to applaud. These must contain important words!
As we did not want too much data, we choose a speaker who gets lots of applause: Mr Barosso. 46% of his speeches in the European Parliament receive applause.

The query we sent to our database is easy:

(: all paragraphs of speeches by Barroso immediately preceding
       applause concatenated into a string : )
string-join(
   collection('/db/euparliament/data/EN')
     //speech[contains(@speaker,"Barroso")]  (: only speeches by Barroso : )
       //p[contains(.,"(Applause)")]                (: find paragraphs containing Applause : )
         /preceding-sibling::p[1],                    (: get the preceding paragraph : )
   ' '
             )

The result, when summarized using Wordle, is rather dissapointing….just a bunch of modal verbs and words referring to his audience…..
Or maybe that is the secret of getting applause?

1 reactie op “What leads to applause?”

  1. Why not try other speakers, in other contexts? That would give extra info and might be more interesting.

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