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The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language
Ying Li1, Tomas Engelthaler2, Cynthia S Q Siew3
1Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. ying.li@warwick.ac.uk.
Behavior Research Methods
|February 13, 2019
Summary
The Macroscope tool analyzes 155 billion words of historical text to track changes in word meaning and usage over two centuries, offering insights into historical psychology.
Area of Science:
- Digital Humanities
- Computational Linguistics
- Historical Psychology
Background:
- Digitized historical texts enable quantitative study of psychological shifts.
- Understanding linguistic evolution requires analyzing word meaning, usage, and environmental influences.
Purpose of the Study:
- Introduce the Macroscope, a novel tool for analyzing historical language changes over the past two centuries.
- Provide quantitative data on semantic shifts, word valence, arousal, and concreteness.
Main Methods:
- Utilizes a corpus of over 155 billion words of historical text.
- Derives word properties from frequency-of-usage and co-occurrence patterns over time.
- Tracks semantic changes, including stability, instability, and semantic drift.
Main Results:
- The Macroscope quantifies changes in word semantics, valence, arousal, and concreteness.
- Identifies semantically stable and unstable words in historical texts.
- Provides data on local and global word properties and their temporal evolution.
Conclusions:
- The Macroscope offers a new quantitative approach to historical psychology.
- Facilitates visualization and download of data for inferential analysis.
- Complements existing historical research with novel insights and methodologies.
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