Dear fellow scholars:
I spent some time last week looking through the newly declassified President's Daily Briefs. I plan to write a scholarly article about these documents, focussing mostly on politicization, the politics of language/labelling and how we understand authorship.
However, I thought it might be interesting to have a number of scholars come together to weigh in on what we could learn from these documents.
Is there interest in:
1. A themed panel on the subject for a scholarly conference like APSA or ISA?
2. Putting together a proposal for a themed issue of a journal like Intelligence and National Security or International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
I would also be interested in speaking with any other scholars contemplating working on these documents so that we can perhaps cooperate. Currently, the docs are posted in a program which is neither Word nor PDF's. I had hoped to run some simple analytics on the documents, looking at things like percent of the brief devoted to particular issues; average word counts and to make some charts which would show how often particular topics were referenced in the PDB. I thought about making word clouds as well. Unfortunately, given the format they are currently in, this would apparently necessitate re-typing all the information into a Word doc. If there were enough interest in having it available in this format, perhaps there is a way that we could cooperate to do this together.
Please contact me if you're interested in pursuing either of these opportunities. Thanks.
Mary Manjikian, PhD
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