Unpacking the United States Air Force's Little Blue Book(s)
Ross A. Jackson
Headquarters Air Force Materiel Command
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, 45433, U.S.A.
Bradley C. Boehmke
Air Force Institute of Technology
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, 45433, U.S.A.
Abstract
Meaning is essential as it is elusive. While potentially irksome when confronting the banalities of everyday existence, such ambiguity is consequential, if not detrimental, in a national security environment. Textual analysis enables one to realize the content, structure, and function of words and phrases contained in documents. Such understandings are particularly relevant in Industrial Engineering (IE) as textual analysis allows one to rigorously interrogate potential negotiated meanings resident in often complex systems of texts and explore implications for action. To illustrate we generate analytically-based insights of the historical versions of the United States Air Force’s (USAF’s) “little blue book.” We leverage word clouds to reveal high-frequency terms, n-gram analyses to illustrate how key words and phrases are employed, and sentiment analysis to ascertain potential contextual polarities in the text. Collectively these insights hold latent potential to help delimit the elusive meaning(s) of a text and provide one with an analytic inroad for understanding. In the process, one may be able to establish better the clarity of intent required to effectively execute one’s mission.
Purpose of Repository
This repository accompanies the research paper "Unpacking the United States Air Force's Little Blue Book(s)" submitted for inclusion in the Proceedings of the 2016 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference. Due to the constrained page limit for submissions this year the methodology section for the submitted paper was greatly truncated. Consequently, this documentation expands the methodology section to provide a more robust understanding of the approach applied. Furthermore, this repository contains the code scripts employed in the analysis and the text analyzed.