Methodology

First, we divided Obama's life by geographical location and major turning points in his career—the Hawaii years, the early Chicago years, his time as an Illinois state senator, and so forth. In some cases we had to fudge it—for example, his monthlong trip to Kenya in 1988, to which Obama devotes a full third of his first memoir, looks like a year on the timeline. In examining Obama's own writings, we looked at how many pages he devoted in his two books—Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope—to each period of his life. We also examined his speeches, counting the number of times since 2002 he has publicly discussed these periods. To measure contemporary news coverage, we searched Nexis for mentions of "Barack Obama." (The Honolulu Advertiser really dropped the ball on the story of the century, "Barack Obama Is Born.") To measure retrospective news coverage, we compiled all the recent investigative pieces from major news sources we could find. This last method is fairly subjective, so if there's anything big we missed, let us know. (Some articles cover more than one period of his life.)