Terror Numbers Make One Wonder

I am working on a new project with colleague Ed Palazzolo. The project is just beginning, but we are looking at the semantic networks of "terrorism" in American media using computational modeling.

We started playing with the data this afternoon with stories in the New York Times that mentioned "terror" or "terrorism" during calendar year 2000. This is a year before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The most frequent word during the entire year (excluding words such as "the") was Bin Laden.

Hmmm.