Sapping Attention

Mostly a note to myself: I think genre data would be helpful in all sorts of ways--tracking evolutionary language through different scienc...

Most intensive text analysis is done on heavily maintained sources. I'm using a mess, by contrast, but a much larger one. Partly, I'...

In addition to finding the similarities in use between particular isms , we can look at their similarities in general. Since we have the dis...

What can we do with this information we’ve gathered about unexpected occurrences? The most obvious thing is simply to look at what words app...

Now to the final term in my sentence from earlier — “How often, compared to what we would expect, does a given word appear with a...

Abraham Lincoln invented Thanksgiving. And I suppose this might be a good way to prove to more literal-minded students that the Victorian in...

This is the second post on ways to measure connections—or more precisely, distance—between words by looking at how often they appear togethe...

I’m back from Moscow, and with a lot of blog content from my 23-hour itinerary. I’m going to try to dole it out slowly, though, be...

Ties between words are one of the most important things computers can tell us about language. I already looked at one way of looking at conn...

One more note on that Grafton quote, which I'll post below. “The digital humanities do fantastic things,” said the eminent Princeton h...

I'm in Moscow now. I still have a few things to post from my layover, but there will be considerably lower volume through Thanksgiving. ...

What are the most distinctive words in the nineteenth century? That's an impossible question, of course. But as I started to say ...

Hank asked for a couple of charts in the comments, so I thought I'd oblige. Since I'm starting to feel they're better at trackin...

I'm going to keep looking at the list of isms, because a) they're fun; and b) the methods we use on them can be used on any group of...

Here's a fun way of using this dataset to convey a lot of historical information. I took all the 414 words that end in ism in my databas...