Ask-Dubya.com is inspired by 7 years of political discourse in America under the G.W. Bush administration. Whether it terms of impenetrable press conferences, rhetorical diversions, embarrassing speeches, issue avoidance, spin, or the continuous reduction of complicated issues into stock or sensationalized generalizations, few presidencies have generated more controversy in regards to communication between the administration and the press and/or public. Using the site is easy. Visitors simply enter a query in the question box, press enter, and receive a manufactured answer built out of our database of actual GWB quotes, speeches, and statements. It's as good as having him right there in front of you!
The database itself is comprised of transcripts of speeches and press conferences available online from the White House, as well as Slate.com's regular RSS feed of "Bush-isms": little rhetorical nuggets reflecting the president's "accidental wit and wisdom." As the answers generated by the site are modeled after typical responses made by the administration, the result is a concoction of ambiguously or loosely related words and phrases that never really address the issue posed, but instead may divert the question, attempt to relay the issue to another source, or lack general coherency and/or logic.
The answers will, however, provide a link to the speech or speeches from which they were derived so that the site’s users may investigate the original context of the text. In this sense, the site serves a tool for researching the policy, politics, and public relations of the current administration. Furthermore, the site can also be understood as a play on search engines like ask.com, but with the search results limited only to content “approved” by the administration.
We wanted to make a web-based project for tactical media, but didn\'t want to create anything too heavy-handed, or at least anything without some humor in it. Sine most of bush\'s transcripts are availabe online, we decided to make a program that allows someone to search through all this data and find relevant content via a humorous interface.
Democrats, Republicans, voters, the politically aware, the politically unaware
A user visits the website, whether at the show or somewhere else, poses a question to the site, and is given both a humorous and informing answer that leads them to investigate the matter further by clicking on the given link.
The site is coded in PHP and uses a MySQL database which houses speeches, quotes, and statements released by the current administration. Users navigate the web per usual, visit the site, enter a question, and recieve a reply.
Learning how to effectively work with markov-chain-type criteria for generating pertinent and coherent text was very fun and a good to learn for making other generative text projects down the road. We haven\'t gone \"live\" with the site, yet, so we don\'t have much user feedback.
The database itself is comprised of transcripts of speeches and press conferences available online from the White House, as well as Slate.com's regular RSS feed of "Bush-isms": little rhetorical nuggets reflecting the president's "accidental wit and wisdom." As the answers generated by the site are modeled after typical responses made by the administration, the result is a concoction of ambiguously or loosely related words and phrases that never really address the issue posed, but instead may divert the question, attempt to relay the issue to another source, or lack general coherency and/or logic.
The answers will, however, provide a link to the speech or speeches from which they were derived so that the site’s users may investigate the original context of the text. In this sense, the site serves a tool for researching the policy, politics, and public relations of the current administration. Furthermore, the site can also be understood as a play on search engines like ask.com, but with the search results limited only to content “approved” by the administration.
We wanted to make a web-based project for tactical media, but didn\'t want to create anything too heavy-handed, or at least anything without some humor in it. Sine most of bush\'s transcripts are availabe online, we decided to make a program that allows someone to search through all this data and find relevant content via a humorous interface.
Democrats, Republicans, voters, the politically aware, the politically unaware
A user visits the website, whether at the show or somewhere else, poses a question to the site, and is given both a humorous and informing answer that leads them to investigate the matter further by clicking on the given link.
The site is coded in PHP and uses a MySQL database which houses speeches, quotes, and statements released by the current administration. Users navigate the web per usual, visit the site, enter a question, and recieve a reply.
Learning how to effectively work with markov-chain-type criteria for generating pertinent and coherent text was very fun and a good to learn for making other generative text projects down the road. We haven\'t gone \"live\" with the site, yet, so we don\'t have much user feedback.