Jan, I should have been more precise. Yes, the article was from
World Politics Review and, when posting, I went right to its greater detail without noting that I'd discovered it when the "hackette" was blowing her own horn over here:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/...at-a-time/ .... which I'd mindlessly (but perhaps accurately?) referred to as Wired/Defense.
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was enrolled in a conference on health planning run by an arm of the BU School of Public Health. There, I learned
a technique for "seeing" and plotting the power/salience positions of various "players" by 'seeing' (or creating a graphic of) a three-dimensional hollowed cube with a mid-stripe which constituted a "zero" line. Graph lines along the inner walls at 1" and 2" (above and below the midline, i.e., both positive and negative) allowed the end-user to label, position and index any entity -- in this case, agency, media outlet, etc. -- on any issue. Done with pen and paper, or mentally, or with computer tools, such a device would allow deep politics analysts to consider, remember, plot and alter the relative positions and strengths of any "party", be they author, columnist, media outlet, spokesperson, etc.
Another way of "seeing this, if my description wasn't clear enough, would be to simply sit your self down mentally inside a room painted white measuring 12' long, 8' wide, 8' high, with a black stripe around the walls at the 4' mark to represent the "zero" line. Marks at 2" and 6' feet represented values of -1 and +1; the floor was -2 and the ceiling +2. Fishing line was used to suspend 2"x2" cards labeled with topic and identity, and its
power measured on the vertical, and its
salience measured on the horizontal.
Voila! A mental visual "walk-through".... Given the right kind of software tool, such a thing could be a semi-permanent or malleable "sticky" on any topic; time and multi-issue cross-over then becomes very instructive, to say nothing of multi-topic cross-over.
Conceptually, mentally, is this how people like Peter Dale Scott think through deep events across decades?