Eigen-Arnett Educational & Cultural Foundation
A Non-Profit, Tax Exempt, IRS Approved 501 c 3 Organization
17 Lake Potomac Court
Potomac, Maryland 20854-1226
Contact: Ramona E.F. Arnett
Phone: 240 988-7400
Fax: 301 299-3727
E-Mail: rarnett@EAfoundation.org

  March 1, 2007

Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations, the world's largest repository of political and historical quotations was first made available to journalists, historians, political scientists, politicians, and students 7 months ago.  This short report documents the amazing utilization.

Traffic

In the 7 month period over 50 million quotes were found as the result of over half a million searchers who have used the early Beta form of Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations.  This is 7 million a month.  This amazing utilization rate was totally unexpected because:

• This is a serious , academic and journalistic subject-not entertainment or celebrity oriented.
• There was no advertising of any kind-just a single e-mail press release announcing that the collection was available for Beta testing.
• This is a data base driven web site so Google and other search engines play a very minor part in steering traffic.  Less than 10% of the searchers come through Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo and all the other search engines combined.

Nonetheless, there has been much more traffic than had been expected by the Eigen-Arnett Educational & Cultural Foundation whose generosity and commitment has made it possible to bring Eigen's Quotations to the world.  Clearly "word of mouth" and unplanned "viral marketing" have done this.

User Assessment

Analyzing the E-mail correspondence that we have received, we can report that the benefits that users like most are-in order of frequency mentioned:

• The comprehensiveness of the collection (now over 50,000 quotations from over 14,000 authors)
• The fact that citations and sources are provided in almost all cases.
• The conceptual index.  Being able to search for concepts even though the concept word(s) might never appear in the quotation.  All 50,000 quotes are conceptually indexed.
• The fact that the collection is just focused on politics and history without extraneous quotations on other subjects that exist in all the great general collections from Bartlett to Simpson.
• The comments and cross references in the quotes.
• The search engine itself that can be operated in basic or advanced modes.
• The editing out of fictitious quotes. (So many of the web quotation sites "scrape" quotations from other sites that a spurious quotation, including one that may have been deliberately planted to support a particular viewpoint, will spread rapidly and then there are so many sources with the quote that people think it must be authentic.)
• The inclusion of quotes from populations usually ignored in such collections - women, ethnic minorities

There were also criticisms

• Hundred's of users observed that we did not include some critical quotations that they thought should have been.  We considered all and added many.
• Too few quotations had accompanying graphics.  (This came mostly from elementary and secondary students and their teachers.)  We are increasing the graphic proportion in response to this request.
• System and search engine is sluggish if the user does not have high-speed, broadband, internet access. Unfortunately, we cannot do much about this.
• Cannot search within a previously searched set of hits.  We have included this capability for future versions.
• Inclusion of hate speech and quotations from terrorists and villains of history.  We are sympathetic to those who raise this problem but we believe that hate and villainy are tragic elements of human history and it is only by learning about them that society will be sufficiently forewarned of their potential tragic consequences.
• Punctuation and English grammar not consistently applied.  (The number was very small but there were several people who did not like our policy of using the forms that were in our sources rather than us changing wording, punctuation, spelling.  There were also a number who felt that we had done too much "editing" and should have left the quotations in the earliest forms they were written and we should not use secondary sources.)
• Where there is an academic dispute regarding the authenticity or authorship of a quote, the issues should be included in the commentary.  (This was mostly from university professors.)  We have already begun to do this.

Time on Task

The average searcher spent 12 minutes doing his/her searching per session.  This was consonant with the alpha test experience and, although long for a web site, was not unexpected and was consistent with the academic and journalistic nature of the material.

Favorite Area

The "Insults & Put-Downs" was the users' favorite area of the 114 different areas.

The Surprises

In the "Most Frequently Searched For Terms" which is given as Appendix A, there are four that are particularly surprising.  None of the staff would have predicted that any of these would end up as a frequent search term.  The most surprising term was "Ataturk"--Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.  He was in 8^th place of ALL terms and descriptors.  Churchill and Kennedy were the top 2 names searched for, but Ataturk was next-3^rd most frequent name searched for.  More people searched for him than they did for Abraham Lincoln and Clinton (both Bill and Hillary combined).  In a vote by Time Magazine a few years ago for "Man of the Century" Ataturk was amongst the leading suggestions-far ahead of Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman and others seemingly better known and more famous.  Remarkable leader that Ataturk was, it is simply hard to understand the contemporary curiosity about this man's quotations.  True, he founded a democratic, secular, Republic, modernized Turkey giving women the vote before most western countries and about the same time as the United States did.  And he did this in a 98% Islamic nation.  Still it is surprising to realize that so many people would even know his name so that they could search for him.

The second surprise is Albert Einstein.  Although one of the world's great geniuses who was outspoken about society and politics, his great fame is as a theoretical physicist and mathematician-not as a political pundit.  Yet there were many people trying to find political and historical quotations of this scientist.

Third, is "assassination".  We have had no recent political assassinations in America, yet the term was actually second on the list, with only "Churchill" leading.  By doing a sampling analysis, the "assassination" term was often associated with John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln.  Also with left wing world leaders who were assassinated such as Lumumba and Alliende.  Also, the role of the CIA in assassination was searched for. But the fact that searches about assassination are so frequent implies to us that the conspiracy theorists have reached a very wide audience indeed.

The 4^th big surprise is a negative one.  During the 7 month Beta Test of the web site reported herein, there were some major political events:  The Iraq War, the Gay Marriage Debate, explosion in the price of oil.  And yet none of these were represented in the top 100 terms.  This suggests to us that there is a heavy academic usage being made of the site.  Supporting that view is the fact that Aristotle shows up on the top 100 lists.  Although one of the great philosophers who wrote one of the classic treatises on politics, his name is rarely mentioned by contemporary politicians or pundits and few quote from him as they do John Locke or Rousseau.  Yet many contemporary people are looking to see what Aristotle had to say about politics.

Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations

Most Frequently Searched For Terms

(Based on the Analysis of the first 500,000 searches.)

1. Churchill, Winston
2. Assassination
3. Democracy
4. Politics
5. Kennedy
6. Freedom-liberty
7. Poverty
8. Ataturk, Kemal
9. Citizenship
10. New York
11. Bush
12. War
13. Lincoln, Abraham
14. Education
15. National
16. Bureaucracy
17. Clinton
18. Leadership
19. Presidency / vice presidency
20. Appointments
21. Corruption
22. Aristotle
23. Justice
24. Religion
25. Einstein, Albert
26. History
27. Love
28. Leadership
29. Power
30. Campaigns-conventions
31. Congress
32. Abortion, birth control
33. Religion
34. Twain, Mark
35. Insults
36. Agriculture
37. Housing
38. Environment
39. Liberals / Conservatives
40. Poverty
41. Veterans
42. Revolution
43. Espionage, intelligence spying
44. English bilingualism
45. Politics politicians
46. Nicknames
47. Energy
48. Human nature
49. Taxes
50. Adams, John
51. Pornography
52. Diplomacy / diplomats
53. Health
54. Reagan
55. Terrorism
56. Jefferson, Thomas
57. Disarmament
58. Privacy
59. Sex
60. Voting, voters elections
61. Law enforcement
62. Labor force
63. Law / the courts
64. Adams, John Quincy
65. Bonus
66. Franklin, Benjamin
67. Families and children
68. Space exploration
69. Taxes
70. Arabs
71. Death
72. Hitler
73. Acheson, dean
74. Change
75. Negotiating
76. Political philosophies
77. American Indians
78. Environment
79. Ethnic groups
80. Government
81. Gun control
82. Foreign policy
83. Slavery
84. Scandals.
85. Patronage / pork barrel
86. War / peace
87. Labor relations, labor unions, strikes
88. The Constitution / Bill of Rights
89. Business / Commerce
90. Human rights