Introduction to Bookworm; Robots Reading Vogue; Bookworm

We were first introduced to the concept of culturomics in December 2010 when Science magazine published “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” The basic premise behind culturomics, and the online text-mining tool it spawned called Bookworm, is learning whether we can map change in language use to changes in culture or behavior. In slightly more technical terms, Bookworm applies computational analysis to a newly bountiful corpus of language that resulted from Google's digitization efforts to track quantitative variables that measure linguistic change in a massive database of text as a way of assessing qualitative changes in cultural trends. For example, one application of culturomics mapped “the latent tone”—or the regular appearance of words with meanings similar to the central concept of “dissent”—of a large digital news archive leading up to the Arab Spring of 2011 and demonstrated that a culturomics approach was predictive of both the geographic location and timing of Egypt's revolt, even accounting for the limitations of state-censored media

Digitization · Linguistics · Media studies · Newspaper · Premise · Reading (process · Sociology · Advanced Text Analysis Techniques · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History