The transformation of literary texts into “data” – frequency counts, probability distributions, vectors – can often seem reductive to scholars trained to read closely, with an eye on the subtleties and slipperiness of language. But digital analysis, in its massive scale and its sheer inhuman capacity of repetitive computation, can register complex patterns and nuances […]
Tag Archives: counting_things
The Musical Mood of the Country
This morning the New York Times published a story today about a group of mathematicians who are counting types of words in popular songs in order to get a handle on something like the mood of the country. In trying to data-mine mood, they do what all people who count things do: move from something […]