Measuring Diffusion through errors

Fabrizio Gilardi

In an article on domestic set blacklists fresh publicised in Governance, J. C. Sharman has the magnificent intent of hunting at the copy of errors as evidence of diffusion. The best example involves Venezuela literally copying and pasting Mexico's legislation: [T]he Venezuelan legislation made reference to the wishes of the Mexican legislature and the requirement to be conformable with the Mexican constitution. Worse still, the example Mexican itemize had included Venezuela, and thus by copying the Mexican list, Venezuela succeeded in blacklisting itself.

The intent of measuring dispersion processes through hunting for repeated errors is not a newborn one (see for example this piece on listing cut-and-pasting), though this is quite mayhap the first application in semipolitical science. The kinds of accumulation provided by MemeTracker provide an engrossing way of doing this on an automated basis for rattling super corpuses worn from online programme sources. Memetracker crapper encounter variant phrases quite easily, which could plausibly serve as markers that would allow researchers (sometimes) to road limited lines of impact crossways sources.