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The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language
The recent rise in digitized historical text has made it possible to quantitatively study our psychological past. This involves understanding changes in what words meant, how words were used, and how these changes may have responded to changes in the environment, such as in healthcare, wealth dispar...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer US
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6690860/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30746643 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6 |
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author | Li, Ying Engelthaler, Tomas Siew, Cynthia S. Q. Hills, Thomas T. |
author_facet | Li, Ying Engelthaler, Tomas Siew, Cynthia S. Q. Hills, Thomas T. |
author_sort | Li, Ying |
collection | PubMed |
description | The recent rise in digitized historical text has made it possible to quantitatively study our psychological past. This involves understanding changes in what words meant, how words were used, and how these changes may have responded to changes in the environment, such as in healthcare, wealth disparity, and war. Here we make available a tool, the Macroscope, for studying historical changes in language over the last two centuries. The Macroscope uses over 155 billion words of historical text, which will grow as we include new historical corpora, and derives word properties from frequency-of-usage and co-occurrence patterns over time. Using co-occurrence patterns, the Macroscope can track changes in semantics, allowing researchers to identify semantically stable and unstable words in historical text and providing quantitative information about changes in a word’s valence, arousal, and concreteness, as well as information about new properties, such as semantic drift. The Macroscope provides information about both the local and global properties of words, as well as information about how these properties change over time, allowing researchers to visualize and download data in order to make inferences about historical psychology. Although quantitative historical psychology represents a largely new field of study, we see this work as complementing a wealth of other historical investigations, offering new insights and new approaches to understanding existing theory. The Macroscope is available online at http://www.macroscope.tech. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6690860 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-66908602019-08-26 The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language Li, Ying Engelthaler, Tomas Siew, Cynthia S. Q. Hills, Thomas T. Behav Res Methods Article The recent rise in digitized historical text has made it possible to quantitatively study our psychological past. This involves understanding changes in what words meant, how words were used, and how these changes may have responded to changes in the environment, such as in healthcare, wealth disparity, and war. Here we make available a tool, the Macroscope, for studying historical changes in language over the last two centuries. The Macroscope uses over 155 billion words of historical text, which will grow as we include new historical corpora, and derives word properties from frequency-of-usage and co-occurrence patterns over time. Using co-occurrence patterns, the Macroscope can track changes in semantics, allowing researchers to identify semantically stable and unstable words in historical text and providing quantitative information about changes in a word’s valence, arousal, and concreteness, as well as information about new properties, such as semantic drift. The Macroscope provides information about both the local and global properties of words, as well as information about how these properties change over time, allowing researchers to visualize and download data in order to make inferences about historical psychology. Although quantitative historical psychology represents a largely new field of study, we see this work as complementing a wealth of other historical investigations, offering new insights and new approaches to understanding existing theory. The Macroscope is available online at http://www.macroscope.tech. Springer US 2019-02-11 2019 /pmc/articles/PMC6690860/ /pubmed/30746643 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
spellingShingle | Article Li, Ying Engelthaler, Tomas Siew, Cynthia S. Q. Hills, Thomas T. The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language |
title | The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language |
title_full | The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language |
title_fullStr | The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language |
title_full_unstemmed | The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language |
title_short | The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language |
title_sort | macroscope: a tool for examining the historical structure of language |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6690860/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30746643 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6 |
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