This very interesting talk by Douglas Bagnall shows how he analysed writing style patterns to (plausibly) identify dirty PR man Carrick Graham (the ‘yellow triangle’) making intensive, hidden contributions to Slater Jnr’s PR attack blog …
Remember many of these commercially-driven ghostwritten posts carry the byline “By Cameron Slater”. That’s more evidence (not ‘proof’ – see Bagnall’s disclaimers in the talk) that Slater Jnr is a liar, in my opinion, and that Graham is a deceitful PR operator.
Great talk, Bagnall himself seems like quite a character. He chose a very worthwhile use of his neural network, perhaps he could try Shakespeare next, see if there’s evidence of ghost writing there!?! 🙂
Heh, nice one.
Not really my field, but I thought it was reasonably well established that Shakespeare ‘pinched’ plot lines from where’er he could find them, including Kit Marlowe. But plagiarism? Hmm.
I thoroughly enjoyed Bagnall’s illustrations. They’re a work in progress and he is delightfully modest and self-effacing, but his analysis seems sound, and it’s good to be reminded just how blatantly Slater Jnr turned his ‘pulpit’ over to his paymaster Carrick Graham and Svengali Simon Lusk — as a commercial enterprise.
The vacuous comparison to ‘native advertising’ (or promotional features) is unconvincing (see previous post) but I’m sure his outrage at being judged as deceitful and corrupt by members of the hated mainstream media is sincere and heartfelt.
Thanks for dropping by.
-P
Here’s a nice sketch about ‘pinching’ (among other things) by some friends of ours, Riding Lights Theatre Company…’Three Poets’*
MP3 file
* from ‘Best of Colour Radio’ by Riding Lights Theatre Company. Released: 1981.
Ha. Was that Jon Cleese?
Thinking on Bagnall’s talk some more, he was adamant that his program was more accurate than the “engram” approach to textual analysis. So it seems to me that after further independent testing, there’s fair reason for it to be allowed as evidence in law.
I hope he does the Bible next.
No, not Python — Riding Lights is a UK theatre company my wife did some workshops with in the 1980s …at that stage Paul & Bernadette Burbridge and Nigel Forde (who are in that sketch, if I recall correctly) and Murray Watts … still going: http://ridinglights.org
On Ngrams, you may be interested in the links in this post:
http://languagehat.com/how-not-to-use-ngrams/
-P