Is catalog information really metadata?

We've been working on making a different type of browser using the Open Library books I've been working with to date, and it's raised a interesting question I want to think through here.

I think many people looking at word countson a large scale right now (myself included) have tended to make a distinction between wordcount data on the one hand, and catalog metadata on the other. (I know I have the phrase "catalog metadata" burned into my reflex vocabulary at this point--I've had to edit it out of this very post several times.) The idea is that we're looking at the history of words or phrases, and the information from library catalogs can help to split or supplement that. So for example, my big concern about the ngrams viewer when it came out was that it included only one form of metadata (publication year) to supplement the word-count data, when it should really have titles, subjects, and so on. But that still assumes that word data--catalog metadata is a useful binary.



I'm starting to think that it could instead be a fairly pernicious misunderstanding.

Wars, Recessions, and the size of the ngrams corpus

Hank wants me to post more, so here's a little problem I'm working on. I think it's a good example of how quantitative analysis can help to remind us of old problems, and possibly reveal new ones, with library collections.

My interest in texts as a historian is particularly focused on books in libraries. Used carefully, an academic library is sufficient to answer many important historical questions. (That statement might seem too obvious to utter, but it's not--the three most important legs of historical research are books, newspapers, and archives, and the archival leg has been lengthening for several decades in a way that tips historians farther into irrelevance.) A fair concern about studies of word frequency is that they can ignore the particular histories of library acquisition patterns--although I think Anita Guerrini takes that point a bit too far in her recent article on culturomics in Miller-McCune. (By the way, the Miller-McCune article on science PhDs is my favorite magazine article of the last couple of years). A corollary benefit, though, is that they help us to start understanding better just what is included in our libraries, both digital and brick.

Background: right now, I need a list of of the most common English words. (Basically to build a much larger version of the database I've been working with; making it is teaching me quite a bit of computer science but little history right now). I mean 'most common' expansively: earlier I found that about 200,000 words gets pretty much every word worth analyzing. There were some problems with the list I ended up producing. The obvious one, the one I'm trying to fix, is that words from the early 19th century, when many fewer books were published, will be artificially depressed compared to newer ones.

But it turns out that a secular increase in words published per year isn't the only effect worth fretting about. Words in the Google Books corpus doesn't just increase steadily over time. Looking at the data series on overall growth, one period immediately jumped out at me:

Graphing and smoothing

I mentioned earlier I've been rebuilding my database; I've also been talking to some of the people here at Harvard about various follow-up projects to ngrams. So this seems like a good moment to rethink a few pretty basic things about different ways of presenting historical language statistics. For extensive interactions, nothing is going to beat a database or direct access to text files in some form. But for quick interactions, which includes a lot of pattern searching and public outreach, we have some interesting choices about presentation.

This post is mostly playing with graph formats, as a way to think through a couple issues on my mind and put them to rest. I suspect this will be an uninteresting post for many people, but it's probably going to live on the front page for a little while given my schedule the next few weeks. Sorry, visitors!

Moving

Starting this month, I’m moving from New Jersey to do a fellowship at the Harvard Cultural Observatory. This should be a very interesting place to spend the next year, and I’m very grateful to JB Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden for the opportunity to work on an ongoing and obviously ambitious digital humanities project. A few thoughts on the shift from Princeton to Cambridge:

What's new?

Let me get back into the blogging swing with a (too long—this is why I can't handle Twitter, folks) reflection on an offhand comment. Don't worry, there's some data stuff in the pipe, maybe including some long-delayed playing with topic models.

Even at the NEH's Digging into Data conference last weekend, one commenter brought out one of the standard criticisms of digital work—that it doesn't tell us anything we didn't know before. The context was some of Gregory Crane's work in describing shifting word use patterns in Latin over very long time spans (2000 years) at the Perseus Project: Cynthia Damon, from Penn, worried that "being able to represent this as a graph instead by traditional reading is not necessarily a major gain." That is to say, we already know this; having a chart restate the things any classicist could tell you is less than useful. I might have written down the quote wrong; it doesn't really matter, because this is a pretty standard response from humanists to computational work, and Damon didn't press the point as forcefully as others do. Outside the friendly confines of the digital humanities community, we have to deal with it all the time.

Predicting publication year and generational language shift

Before end-of-semester madness, I was looking at how shifts in vocabulary usage occur. In many cases, I found, vocabulary change doesn't happen evenly across across all authors. Instead, it can happen generationally; older people tend to use words at the rate that was common in their youth, and younger people anticipate future word patterns. An eighty-year-old in 1880 uses a world like "outside" more like a 40-year-old in 1840 than he does like a 40-year-old in 1880. The original post has a more detailed explanation.

Will had some some good questions in the comments about how different words fit these patterns. Looking at different types of words should help find some more ways that this sort of investigation is interesting, and show how different sorts of language vary. But to look at other sorts of words, I should be a little clearer about the kind of words I chose the first time through. If I can describe the usage pattern for a "word like 'outside'," just what kind of words are like 'outside'? Can we generalize the trend that they demonstrate?

The 1940 election

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how ancestry.com structured census data for genealogy, not history, and how that limits what historians can do with it. Last week, I got an interesting e-mail from IPUMS, at the Minnesota population center on just that topic:

We have an extraordinary opportunity to partner with a leading genealogical firm to produce a microdata collection that will encompass the entire 1940 census of population of over 130 million cases. It is not feasible to digitize every variable that was collected in the 1940 census. We are therefore seeking your help to prioritize variables for inclusion in the 1940 census database.

In search of the great white whale

All the cool kids are talking about shortcomings in digitized text databases. I don't have anything so detailed to say as what Goose Commerce or Shane Landrum have gone into, but I do have one fun fact. Those guys describe ways that projects miss things we might think are important but that lie just outside the most mainstream interests—the neglected Early Republic in newspapers, letters to the editor in journals, etc. They raise the important point that digital resources are nowhere near as comprehensive as we sometimes think, which is a big caveat we all need to keep in mind. I want to point out that it's not just at the margins we're missing texts: omissions are also, maybe surprisingly, lurking right at the heart of the canon. Here's an example.

Age cohort and Vocabulary use

Let's start with two self-evident facts about how print culture changes over time:

1. The words that writers use change. Some words flare into usage and then back out; others steadily grow in popularity; others slowly fade out of the language.
2. The writers using words change. Some writers retire or die, some hit mid-career spurts of productivity, and every year hundreds of new writers burst onto the scene. In the 19th-century US, median author age stays within a few years of 49: that constancy, year after year, means the supply of writers is constantly being replenished from the next generation.

How do (1) and (2) relate to each other? To what extent do the shifting group of authors create the changes in language, and how much do changes happen in a culture that authors all draw from?

This might be a historical question, but it also might be a linguistics/sociology/culturomics one. Say there are two different models of language use: type A and type B.

• Type A means a speaker drifts on the cultural winds: the language shifts and everyone changes their vocabulary every year.
• Type B, on the other hand, assumes that vocabulary is largely fixed at a certain age: a speaker will be largely consistent in her word choice from age 30 to 70, say, and new terms will not impinge on her vocabulary.

 Both of these models are extremes, and we can assume that hardly any words are pure A or pure B. To firm this up, let me concretize this with two nicely alphabetical examples of fictional characters to warm up the subject for all you humanists out there:

• Type A: John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. Rabbit doesn't know what he wants to say. Every decade, his vocabulary changes; he talks like a ennui-ed salaryman in the 50s, flirts with hippiedom and Nixonian silent-majorityism in the 60s, spends the late 70s hoarding gold and muttering about Consumer Reports and the Japanese. For Updike, part of Rabbit being an everyman is the shifts he undergoes from book to book: there's a sort of implicit type-A model underlying his transformations. He's a different person at every age because America is different in every year.

• Type B: Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe. Frank Bascombe, on the other hand, has his own voice. It shifts from decade to decade, to be sure, but 80s Bascombe sounds more like 2000s Bascombe than he sounds like 80s Angstrom. What does change is internal to his own life: he's in the Existence period in the 90s and worries about careers, and the 00s he's in the Permanent Period and worried about death. Bascombe is a dreamy outsider everywhere he goes: the Mississippian who went to Ann Arbor, always perplexed by the present.*

Anyhow: I don't have good enough author metadata right now to check this on authors (which would be really interesting), but I can do it a bit on words. An Angstrom word would be one that pops up across all age cohorts in society simultaneously; a Bascombe word is one that creeps in more with each succeeding generation, but that doesn't change much over time within an age cohort.

This is getting into some pretty multi-dimensional data, so we need something a little more complicated than line graphs. The solution I like right now is heat maps.

An example: I know that "outside" is a word that shows a steady, upward trend from 1830 to 1922; in fact, I found that it was so steady that it was among the best words at helping to date books based on their vocabulary usage. So how did "outside" become more popular? Was it the Angstrom model, where everyone just started using it more? Or was it the Bascombe model, where each succeeding generation used it more and more? To answer that, we need to combine author birth year with year of publication:

Stopwords to the wise

Shane Landrum (@cliotropic) says my claim that historians have different digital infrastructural needs than other fields might be provocative. I don't mean this as exceptionalism for historians, particularly not compared to other humanities fields. I do think historians are somewhat exceptional in the volume of texts they want to process—at Princeton, they often gloat about being the heaviest users of the library. I do think this volume is one important reason English has a more advanced field of digital humanities than history does. But the needs are independent of the volume, and every academic field has distinct needs. Data, though, is often structured for either one set of users, or for a mushy middle.

A particularly clear connection is from database structures to "categories of analysis" in our methodology. Since humanists share methods in a lot of ways, digital resources designed for one humanities discipline will carry well for others. But it's quite possible to design a resource that makes extensive use of certain categories of analysis nearly impossible.

One clear-cut example: ancestry.com. The bulk of interest in digitized census records lies in two groups: historians and genealogists. That web site is clearly built for the latter: it has lots of genealogy-specific features built into the database for matching sound-alike names and misspellings, for example, but almost nothing for social history. (I'm pretty sure you can't use it to find German cabinet-makers in Camden in 1850, for example.) Ancestry.com views names (last names in particular) as the most important field and structures everything else around serving those up. Lots of historians are more interested in the place or the profession or the ancestry fields in the census: what we take as a unit of analysis affects what we want to see database indexes and search terms built around. (And that's not even getting into the question of aggregating the records into statistics.)

Generations vs. contexts

When I first thought about using digital texts to track shifts in language usage over time, the largest reliable repository of e-texts was Project Gutenberg. I quickly found out, though, that they didn't have works for years, somewhat to my surprise. (It's remarkable how much metadata holds this sort of work back, rather than data itself). They did, though, have one kind of year information: author birth dates. You can use those to create same type of charts of word use over time that people like me, the Victorian Books project, or the Culturomists have been doing, but in a different dimension: we can see how all the authors born in a year use language rather than looking at how books published in a year use language.

I've been using 'evolution' as my test phrase for a while now: but as you'll see, it turns out to be a really interesting word for this kind of analysis. Maybe that's just chance, but I think it might be a sort of indicative test case--generational shifts are particularly important for live intellectual issues, perhaps, compared to overall linguistic drift.

To start off, here's a chart of the usage of the word "evolution" by share of words per year. There's nothing new here yet, so this is merely a reminder:

 

Here's what's new: we can also plot by year of author birth, which shows some interesting (if small) differences:

Cronon's politics

Let me step away from digital humanities for just a second to say one thing about the Cronon affair.
(Despite the professor-blogging angle, and that Cronon's upcoming AHA presidency will probably have the same pro-digital history agenda as Grafton's, I don't think this has much to do with DH). The whole "we are all Bill Cronon" sentiment misses what's actually interesting. Cronon's playing a particular angle: one that gets missed if we think about him as either a naïve professor, stumbling into the public sphere, or as a liberal ideologue trying to score some points.

Author Ages

Back from Venice (which is plastered with posters for "Mapping the Republic of Letters," making a DH-free vacation that much harder), done grading papers, MAW paper presented. That frees up some time for data. So let me start off looking at a new pool for book data for a little while that I think is really interesting.

Open Library metadata has author birth dates. The interaction of these with publication years offers a lot of really fascinating routes to go down, and hopefully I can sketch out a few over the next week or two. Let me start off, thought, with just a quick note on its reliability, scope, etc., looking only at the metadata itself. The really interesting stuff won't come out of metadata manipulation like this, but rather out of looking at actual word use patterns. But I need to understand what's going one before that's possible.

Open Library has pretty comprehensive metadata on authors. In the bigpubs database I made, about 40,000 books have author birth years, and 8,000 do not; given that some of those are corporate authors, anonymous, etc., that's not bad at all. (About 1500 books have no author listed whatsoever).

First, a pretty basic question: how old are authors when they write books? I've been meaning to switch over to ggplot in R for basic graphing, so here's a chance to break its histogram function. Here's a chart of author age for all the books in my bigpubs set:

What historians don't know about database design…

I've been thinking for a while about the transparency of digital infrastructure, and what historians need to know that currently is only available to the digitally curious. They're occasionally stirred by a project like ngrams to think about the infrastructure, but when that happens they only see the flaws. But those problems—bad OCR, inconsistent metadata, lack of access to original materials—are present to some degree in all our texts.

One of the most illuminating things I've learned in trying to build up a fairly large corpus of texts is how database design constrains the ways historians can use digital sources. This is something I'm pretty sure most historians using jstor or google books haven't thought about at all. I've only thought about it a little bit, and I'm sure I still have major holes in my understanding, but I want to set something down.

Historians tend to think of our online repositories as black boxes that take boolean statements from users, apply it to data, and return results. We ask for all the books about the Soviet Union written before 1917, Google spits it back. That's what computers aspire to. Historians respond by muttering about how we could have 13,000 misdated books for just that one phrase. The basic state of the discourse in history seems to be stuck there. But those problems are getting fixed, however imperfectly. We should be muttering instead about something else.

Genres in Motion

Here's an animation of the PCA numbers I've been exploring this last week.

There's quite a bit of data built in here, and just what it means is up for grabs. But it shows some interesting possibilities. As a reminder: at the end of my first post on categorizing genres, I arranged all the genres in the Library of Congress Classification in two dimensional space using the first two principal components. PCA basically find the combinations of variables that most define the differences within a group. (Read more by me here or generally here.). The first dimension roughly corresponded to science vs. non-science: the second separated social science from the humanities. It did, I think, a pretty good job at showing which fields were close to each other. But since I do history, I wanted to know: do those relations change? Here's that same data, but arranged to show how those positions shift over time. I made this along the same lines as the great Rosling/Gapminder bubble charts, created with this via this. To get it started, I'm highlighting psychology.


[If this doesn't load, you can click through to the file here]. What in the world does this mean?