“Predicting a conflict a year, or a year and a half in advance, that’s something our systems were already capable of. Cassandra promised to register disturbances five to seven years in advance – that was something new.”
The German defence ministry decided to extend Project Cassandra’s funding by two years. It wanted Wertheimer’s team to develop a method for converting literary insights into hard facts that could be used by military strategists or operatives: “emotional maps” of crisis regions, especially in Africa and the Middle East, that measured “the rise of violent language in chronological order”.