On NPR's Morning Edition, I listened to a piece by Shankar Vedantam called What Earthquakes Can Teach Us About Elections. In the piece, political historian, Adam Lichtman is interviewed and asked how it was possible for his prediction of the presidential election winner to be correct, before the election. Lichtman says that geophysics is the answer to the political predictions. Lichtman tells how a lot is actually stollen from the geophysicist. For example: "Tremors of Political Change", "Volcanic Elections", and "Seismic Numbers of Voters". These are terms that are referred to elections by many political analyzers. In the interview, Adam Lichtman also talks about how there are two stages of earthquakes, stability and upheaval. In the elections, when you have stability, that means that the incumbent will win and when you have an upheaval, the opposing party wins. An example of this is if there is a major foreign policy win, the incumbent will win, but if there is a recession, the upheaval will win. How Adam Lichtman knows all of this is that he has studied elections from 1860-1980 and came up with questions that is 6 of them are answered in a certain way, there will be an earthquake or an upheaval and the opposing opponent will win the election.
To analyze this interview we must first ask, "What is the genre?" When you typically think of genre, you usually think of books (fiction or non-fiction) or music (rap, pop, country or house music). But the genre is just what form the reading form takes. Many factors take place when analyzing the genre of this interview. Was the interview formal or informal. In this case, the interview was formal with proper names and titles given and the questions asked. Another part of is the interview was that it was full of evidence which is key when analyzing the piece. Both the interviewer and the person being interview gave their information and then cited where they got it from. In the case of Adam Lichtman, he told the interviewer where he learned all about geophysics from. Finally, and one of the most important pieces of analysis, is organization. The interview was very organized in the way that a statement would be told and then they would information about that statement so the listeners would understand it.
All in all, this was a very good interview on NPR's Morning Edition. It had all the parts that of a good interview when analyzing it.
First off, I can't decide if geopolitical political predictions is a stroke of genius or a knee slapper but it is surely an interesting pick! My gut tells me that it is a clever look at elections that are already overanalyzed. This is a great idea and you will do a good job.
ReplyDeleteOne direction you could take this is to use the general ideas of drastic political analysis and talk about things that could help a system of government that many people are unhappy with. It is a simple problem-solution situation.
Watch a random political news channel and look for characteristics of current methods of analysis that could use some revision. The best way to grow your own content is to build off the content that directly applies to your topic.
Good luck and I am anxious to see what path you end up taking!
I liked how you talked about how the different earthquake lingo correlated to the elections. That was a strong thing to talk about and it added to the post.
ReplyDeleteWhat I would have liked to see more of was what the outline of the post was like. You brought up some good points and talked about the interview and how the structure of it was like, but I think that you could have told us more about why this information was important to know about. The reason behind why they were telling us this information seems unclear.
That is all I have to say about that, so have fun!
I found the way you analyzed this to be very interesting for the fact that I was very interested in this year's Presidential Election all because of the fact of how greatly effected I am in each of the outcomes. The best word I could come up with for the article you analyzed was weird and odd. It's greatly interesting to find out that geographical disasters somehow have a way of effecting presidential elections but rare and odd as well. You forgot to do your options for your project, though just a head's up. Good luck with the project!
ReplyDelete