Very interesting, thanks for doing all the work and presenting the results, before looking at the list, I wanted to test my own perception of western outlook (interest) on Iran, so I tried to guess the top 10 items. To my surprise, I had oil as number 4 and I don't see it on the list (at least in a direct sense, perhaps it falls under number 18 or 33). I would personally disagree with the claim that oil/gas is not a predominant issue in westen policy making and would not interpret the list provided to say that. Any thoughts? Perhaps we should be careful in interpreting the list?

Very Interesting! One thing I'd still like to know about the methodologoy is the context of the articles chosen. Is it broad enough? Maybe you could also give a categorized list of their titles/subject?

Brilliant experiment, Mehdi !

Ali, I don't think the posting tries to imply that the ordering in the list reflects what's really on the western policy makers' agenda.
As a matter of fact, since it is all taken out of news articles, it could show how the western media want the people in the west to think of Iran. It could even show, what the policy makers are trying to build their case (whatever it is, next military campaign, a coup, regime change, etc. ) around. But I think a period of 6 months might be a little bit short to enable us to deduce anything nearly accurate.

Maybe if you could run it from say, Sept. 11, 2001 then you could make a more solid conclusion because news focus changes. I bet if you run your script a month from now you will have the word terrorism climb considerably. You might then even have the word "Argentina" in your top 50.

Another thing: that Khatami is last in this list or Khamenei is not there at all does not quite mean that Aghazadeh is more known, or associated to Iran's name, to the western media audience. In my experience, many people who have something to say about Iran when they know one is Iranian, know about Khatami for sure, and Khamenei too. I guess one could repeat your word count with Iran replaced with Khatami or Khamenei, to see, first, what is their absolute count, and what they are associated with. The absolute number would show how much the readers know about them, and the associations would show what they might think about them.

I'm also a bit troubled with the 10-word distance defined in your methodology: For Khatami, say, to be linked to Iran and known to the readers of these articles, his name should not necessarily fall into that radius from the word Iran. This could be generalized to all top-ranking official's proper names to some extent.

Another question about methodology. Whate were the papers and periodicals you chose? Did you have a criterion for choosing them? Are they only American or have you included the say, Canadian ones as well?
Anyway, it was really an interesting experiment.

Ali : Oil indeed appears 81 times in those articles, but it is not overused as much as the 50 words above. Also, the words in the list above show what media's concerns are, or what politicions use in the media to convey their message. However, the ambitions of politicions could include other things that do not appear in the list above.

Babak and Elnaz: I relied on LEXISNEXIS to give me the most relevant news articles, and LEXISNEXIS has its own complex way of doing that, but I can assure you that they don't have time to adjust their system to highlight Iran's nuclear news. The list of sources for the articles include BBC, CNN, NPR, PBS, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, World News Digest, Christian Science Monitor, etc.

The categories of articles remain diverse. They even include a
talk by Azar Nafisi on her memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" or a talk by Ali Alemozafar reported in the Stanford Daily.

I believe that much better studies can be done that could take more than just one or two nights. However, you(specially the physicists and engineers) have to come to terms with the fact that any experiment in the area of social science can be full of deficiencies because of parameters that can not be controled, and that is why cautious and limited conclusions should be drawn from them.

This was interesting, indeed.

I think you said it quite well, Mehdi, in the last paragraph of your response to comments above. I think it's worth being repeated:

"[A]ny experiment in the area of social science can be full of deficiencies [...] and that is why cautious and limited conclusions should be drawn from them."

This doesn't subtract from the value of your effort for quantification of something that is ordinarily deemed unquantifiable. I have had the same experience as Babak S that Americans who know a little about Iran have heard about Khatami as well, and some can even produce a good approximation of how his name is actually pronounced. Elbaradei? I don't think so. Aghazadeh? No way.

Maybe the frequency of the word is not the only determining factor. (I have to confess that I am totally clueless re: what you mean by the words being "overused".) There must be other parameters determining how a word stands out or resonates with the readers' background.

In any case, thanks a lot for letting us know about the research, but I also wanted to say something about what is explicit (even stressed) in Arash's comment and tacit in your own comment.

Arash wrote: "it could show how the western media want the people in the west to think of Iran". You wrote: "the words in the list above show what media's concerns are". I want to challenge this conspiracy-theoretical attitude and ask you if you think that the American media are free or not. If not (and this may well be the case for some of them), in what ways do you think the media are controlled, or at least affected by the whim and desire of politicians?

I think a lot of the problems is that US news media doesn't understand Iran. 95% of them don't even seem to be able to figure out how the poitical system works, or more cerectly, doesn't work. Iran is too complex to put into tiny sound bites and too hard to understand, so to avoid looking foolish (yeah, I really think they do at least try) they skip it all together.

Have you tried to this observation with "Iraq" in the period of at least six month before last US-Iraq war?
I think Iraq could provide us with an empirical clue that how much effecient would be this observation.

Nice job Mehdi, I think this is a very good example for non-social scientist majority of us, that we can still do interesting research, using our technical skills in the areas of social science that we care about.
I wanted to underline an important theoretical underpinning of Mehdi's work which makes this type of research valuable and meaningful. This is that fact that occurance of a well-known word (e.g. terrorism) close to, specially after, anther word (e.g. Iran) is a very important parameter in shaping the reader's attitude towards the other word.
This type of influence is completely unconscious and has nothing to do with our logical deduction and thinking skills. The literature on reinforcement and conditioning discusses the mechanisms and details of this area. You may have heard about Pavlov's experiences with dogs, where dogs were conditioned to emit digestive fluids upon hearing a bell, which used to ring before their food.
The same mechanism works very strongly for humans as well: if you have had an accident at cross-road X, you will be more cautious next times you pass it, even if the possibility of accident there is no more than other places... or you will have a good feeling when you pass the cafe you used to meet your girl/boy friend long time ago. The same mechanism can work here: the word terrorism evokes a lot of negative pictures and reactions for an American reader, if the word is repeated several times after seeing the word Iran, then their mind creates an association between not only terrorism and Iran, but also all the negative feelings coming with terrorism and the word Iran. If you are interested, you can read more about reinforcement and conditioning at this link
At the end, I want to stress the importance of such unconscious processes, because, we usually have a strong bias to over-estimate the importance of conscious/logical reasons in determining human action. In fact, research in human decision-making is increasingly pointing to the conscious processes as the tip of the iceberg, increasing the importance of other dimensions of behavior.

Senior Grad,
I am not sure if I can call my suggestion conspiracy-theoretical. I believe the bulk of the news, no matter where in the world it is published, focuses on what's current and in the world of politics, it's the politicians who decide what's current and what's not.

Regarding your question (I don't think you particularly asked me but I'll say what I believe anyway :-) ), I think the media in the US are indeed free in the sense that they are not restrained from covering events from their own perspectives. However, I do think the media, especially the news buesiness, is highly monopolized in the US. Major news corporations are owned by people with certain political affiliations and more importantly the journalism that's being exercised there, is highly influenced (if not controlled) and kept in line with those affiliations. I rarely see any independent journalism on CNN, or the Fox news channel, or MSNBC; and almost none, of the kind I see on BBC. I don't honestly think any news corporation in the U.S. could measure up in terms of independence and balanced reporting to what BBC did with the British government. Let us not forget, that BBC is financed by the British government. Can you even imagine a U.S. news corporation financed by the White House doing a piece on the Bush administration the way BBC's Andrew Gilligan did on Blair's cabinet? Again, let me reiterate that I characterize this as lack of indepedence and balance rather than lack of freedom.

Thanks for the reply, Arash. In fact, I know a writer who told me that the X Foundation wanted her to excise mention of something (I'm afraid I can't be too specific) in an article she wrote for them. "The [X] people do great work, but they are incredibly cowardly. They were attacked by [Y] and they've been aquiver ever since", she wrote me in an email. So, I guess I was playing the role of Devil's advocate (almost literally!) in my comment above. What's the remedy, though? Watching BBC and asking others to do so as well?!

Another thing: I was later wondering maybe if Mehdi had done that experiment with "Iranian" rather than "Iran", Khatami's name would show up much more frequently. (He's the Iranian president, after all.) It's interesting to compare the outcomes of these experiments --one with "Iran" and one with "Iranian".

As everyone mentioned, great job Mehdi! Recently I met some israelly scientists, and I had long discussions with them. This was very interesing and I might write about it sometime. Their biggest concern and question was about Iran nuclear plan. It was surprising for me, but I realize soon that, this is a fair concern. After all Iran is the only country that does not consider any legitimicy for Israels existance.

Great job. Interesting results. The blogosphere and link counting will be doing some of this kind of work.

The methodology is prolly quite sound; I wonder about the robustness of the results. Taking 20 words, instead of just 10, for instance. Yet I wouldn't be surprised by little change.

Similarly, use the same methodology with Iraq, or "Saudi Arabia", or Jordan. Then the differences become more striking -- I'm sure the nuclear program/ threat is the biggest issue for the US.

Since I'm an American in Slovakia, I should also note how so many people are very concerned about America's perception of their country, but almost oblivious to the perceptions of other countries about their country. As well as usually being little informed about those less important countries. Just not enough time to keep up over the world.

You're doing good here. I wish demonstrations on the 9th could have been more significant; maybe next year. Peaceful, candlelight vigils can be very powerful. They were start in Czechoslovakia in 1988, before the Velvet revolution of 1989.