Sapping Attention

Open Library has pretty good metadata. I'm using it to assemble a couple new corpuses that I hope should allow some better analysis than...

I'm trying to get a new group of texts to analyze. We already have enough books to move along on certain types of computer-assisted text...

In writing about openness and the ngrams database, I found it hard not to reflect a little bit about the role of copyright in all this. I...

The Culturomics authors released a FAQ last week that responds to many of the questions floating around about their project. I should, by t...

I'll end my unannounced hiatus by posting several charts that show the limits of the search-term clustering I talked about last week be...

Because of my primitive search engine , I've been thinking about some of the ways we can better use search data to a) interpret historic...

More access to the connections between words makes it possible to separate word-use from language. This is one of the reasons that we need a...

To my surprise, I built a search engine as a consequence of trying to quantify information about word usage in the books I downloaded from t...

How are words linked in their usage? In a way, that's the core question of a lot of history. I think we can get a bit of a picture of th...

I've started thinking that there's a useful distinction to be made in two different ways of doing historical textual analysis. First...

I finally got some call numbers. Not for everything, but for a better portion than I thought I would: about 7,600 records, or c. 30% of my b...

Before Christmas, I spelled out a few ways of thinking about historical texts as related to other texts based on their use of different word...

  Dan Cohen  gives the comprehensive Digital Humanities treatment on Ngrams, and he mostly gets it right. There's just one technical poi...

Back to my own stuff. Before the Ngrams stuff came up, I was working on ways of finding books that share similar vocabularies. I said at the...

I wrote yesterday about how well the filters applied to remove some books from ngrams work for increasing the quality of year information a...