So my topic is to be Open Source Intelligence Analysis using R and text mining....


What is the current mood say in Iran, at this present moment? Intelligence agencies might benefit from a tool that can collect information intelligently to support government or military decision making.  The Blog sphere, Twitter and many other Social Networking sites could example provide the required information. 


I received a couple of white papers with examples on how terrorists use these methods for communication and information gathering which I read and quite eye opening, the use of smart phones and only a certain amount character status updates is very significant. I will have to research more into other similar situations. This investigation will be independent, although guidance from my Lecturer if required.


My next stage (today) is to fully understand how R works and the process of data/text mining as I have had no experience so far, I will be posting any useful links that i found helpful, and to see if there is an alternative open source tool to R as it seems a bit outdated and hard to navigate around.


I have to consider a question for my thesis and an area for investigation, my lecturer suggested the Question time twitter feed as there is a lot of opinion on there and might be worthwhile trying to mine that. (Once i get to grips with what mining actually does!)


Hoping that when I meet with Les (Lecturer) that i will feel more confident about which angle to take on this.