Memcons: Interactive Topic Model Force Graph

The placement of the ‘Cambodia’ topic outside that military arc, much closer to ‘Laughter’ than, say, ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Soviet,’ is very interesting, suggesting that the archive may contain only those documents of a less contentious or generic nature compared to those other topics.The “Cambodia” topic’s comparative proximity to the Laughter topic, clearly visible in this graph, reflects an uncharacteristically ‘jovial’ slant of the content of the documents in the Cambodia topic in comparison to those from the other topics of similarly grave military importance. It is an odd result that supports other findings that the archive’s “Cambodia” material on which this topic is based is likely a hand-picked, sanitized and non-representative selection of only the more congenial exchanges regarding Cambodia, specifically excluding tense and difficult situations. Memoranda detailing planning and execution of disavowed military incursions, involvement in the installation of the Lon Nol regime, and other incidents are largely absent from the archive. Computational techniques here combined with a subjective historian’s assessment of the inapplicability of ‘laughter’ to topics like Cambodia, have thus uncovered a strong relationship between a document’s classification status and its subject matter. Further interpretations of the proximity of the ‘laughter’ topic (among others) to these geopolitical foci are detailed in greater depth in the written paper.

Telcons: Interactive Topic Model Force Graph
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Topic Modeling performed using ‘MALLET Topic Modeling Toolkit.’