More on "culturomics"
The "culturomics" paper that Geoff Nunberg posted about is getting a lot of well-deserved kudos. Jean Véronis writes
When I was a student at the end of the 1970's, I never dared imagine, even in my wildest dreams, that the scientific community would one day have the means of analyzing computerized corpuses of texts of several hundreds of billions of words.
I've contributed my voice to the chorus — Robert Lee Holtz in the Wall Street Journal ("New Google Database Puts Centuries of Cultural Trends in Reach of Linguists", WSJ 12/17/2010) quotes me this way:
"We can see patterns in space, time and cultural context, on a scale a million times greater than in the past," said Mark Liberman, a computational linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, who wasn't involved in the project. "Everywhere you focus these new instruments, you see interesting patterns."
And I meant every word of that. But there's a worm in the bouquet of roses.
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