Linguistic dark matter - culturomics

[Jonathan Lighter]

>The massive searchable database is being hailed as the key to a new era of
research in the humanities, linguistics and social sciences that has been
dubbed "culturomics".

"at Harvard University": The famous one?

"being hailed": By whom? Sez who?  (I can guess.)

"the key": To open what?  (I can't guess.)

"been dubbed": To make it look really important.

"a new era of research": Of similar quality.

For another recent, high-profile Harvard product, see _A New Literary
History of the United States_, ed. by rock-critic Greil Marcus.

JL





On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 5:25 AM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Linguistic dark matter - culturomics
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> WOTY - "culturomics"
>
> from
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/16/google-tool-english-cultural-trends?INTCMP=SRCH
>
> How many words in the English language never make it into dictionaries? How
> has the nature of fame changed in the past 200 years? How do scientists and
> actors compare in their impact on popular culture?
> These are just some of the questions that researchers and members of the
> public can now answer using a new online tool developed by Google with the
> help of scientists at Harvard University. The massive searchable database is
> being hailed as the key to a new era of research in the humanities,
> linguistics and social sciences that has been dubbed "culturomics".
>
>
>
> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
> see truespel.com phonetic spelling
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender: American Dialect Society
> > Poster: Michael Quinion
> > Organization: World Wide Words
> > Subject: Linguistic dark matter
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Science reports on a massive searchable corpus created from some five
> > million books, now available on Google: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
> >
> > One report is here: http://bit.ly/ffQCmR . It quotes the researchers:
> >
> > "We estimated that 52% of the English lexicon - the majority of words
> used
> > in English books - consist of lexical 'dark matter' undocumented in
> > standard references."
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Michael Quinion
> > Editor, World Wide Words
> > Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org