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The macroscope : a tool for examining the historical structure of language
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Li, Ying, Engelthaler, Tomas, Siew, Cynthia S.Q. and Hills, Thomas Trenholm (2019) The macroscope : a tool for examining the historical structure of language. Behavior Research Methods . doi:10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6 ISSN 1554-351X.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6
Abstract
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 avail- able online at http://www.macroscope.tech.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | ||||||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Language and history -- Software, Psycholinguistics | ||||||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Behavior Research Methods | ||||||||||||
Publisher: | Psychonomic Society, Inc. | ||||||||||||
ISSN: | 1554-351X | ||||||||||||
Official Date: | 11 February 2019 | ||||||||||||
Dates: |
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DOI: | 10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6 | ||||||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Behavior Research Methods. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6 | ||||||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 10 April 2019 | ||||||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 10 April 2019 | ||||||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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