Sunday, December 5, 2010

Analyzing Victorians with ICT

How ICT can help scholars analyze history:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html

The article discusses how the 1,681,161 books published in English in the UK during 1789-1914 are analyzed for frequency of keywords in titles such as "revolution", "God", "science", "Hope", "work", etc.

Below is an excerpt from Dan Cohen's blog which is referenced in the NYT article above:

Searching for the Victorians


[A rough transcript of my keynote at the Victorians Institute Conference, held at the University of Virginia on October 1-3, 2010. The conference had the theme "By the Numbers." Attended by "analog" Victorianists as well as some budding digital humanists, I was delighted by the incredibly energetic reaction to this talk—many terrific questions and ideas for doing scholarly text mining from those who may have never considered it before. The talk incorporates the first results of a grant that Fred Gibbs and I were awarded from Google to mine their vast collection of books.]
Why did the Victorians look to mathematics to achieve certainty, and how we might understand the Victorians better with the mathematical methods they bequeathed to us? I want to relate the Victorian debate about the foundations of our knowledge to a debate that we are likely to have in the coming decade, a debate about how we know the past and how we look at the written record that I suspect will be of interest to literary scholars and historians alike. It is a philosophical debate about idealism, empiricism, induction, and deduction, but also a practical discussion about the methodologies we have used for generations in the academy.
[ ...]

Validation
So what does the data look like even at this early stage? And does it seem valid? That is where we began our analysis, with graphs of the percent of all books published with certain words in the titles (y-axis) on a year by year basis (x-axis). Victorian intellectual life as it is portrayed in this data set is in many respects consistent with what we already know.
The frequency chart of books with the word in “revolution” in the title, for example, shows spikes where it should, around the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. (Keen-eyed observers will also note spikes for a minor, failed revolt in England in 1817 and the successful 1830 revolution in France.)

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