Distant Light: Songs on Texts by Richard Boada

Distant Light: Songs on Texts by Richard Boada is a collection of songs for baritone voice, piano, alto saxophone, and percussion (vibraphone and marimba). The texts do not present a continuous narrative, but they share common themes. Most are set in the rural South and deal with the conflict between nature and industrial development. This piece functions as a cohesive whole, but each song could be performed separately and would be effective out of the context of the entire work. Distant Light is made up of eight songs and is approximately 23 minutes in duration.

[Book reviews] Review of J. E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period and D. Sivan and Z. Cochavi-Rainey, West Semitic Vocabulary in Egyptian Script of the 14th to the 10th Centuries BCE

Reviews of: [1] James E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period, (1994), Princeton University Press. [2] Daniel Sivan and Zipora Cochavi-Rainey, West Semitic Vocabulary in Egyptian Script of the 14th to the 10th Centuries BCE, (1992), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press.

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using words as Data

We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We “export” the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our “language-blind” word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.