Strategic Intelligence Analysis: From Information Processing to Meaning-Making

Strategic intelligence involves the efforts to understand the "Big Picture" emerging from data sources. Concerning textual data, this process involves the extraction of meaning from textual information. In this paper we present a new methodology for meaning extraction from news articles. This methodology is based on the gradual construction of visual maps from processed textual information. The methodology is not a substitute for meaningmaking by human agents but combines computational power with human evaluation and provides a tool for identifying emerging patterns of meaning.