Book contents
- The Dangerous Art of Text Mining
- The Dangerous Art of Text Mining
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Toward a Smarter Data Science
- Part II The Hidden Dimensions of Temporal Experience
- Chapter 6 The Many Windows of the House of the Past
- Chapter 7 Of Memory
- Chapter 8 The Distinctiveness of Certain Eras
- Chapter 9 The Measure of Influence
- Chapter 10 The Fit of Algorithms to Temporal Experience
- Chapter 11 Whither Modernity
- Chapter 12 Attacks on Environmentalists in Congress
- Part III Disciplinary Implications
- Appendix: Notes on Data, Code, Labor, Room for Error, and British History
- Index
Chapter 9 - The Measure of Influence
from Part II - The Hidden Dimensions of Temporal Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2023
- The Dangerous Art of Text Mining
- The Dangerous Art of Text Mining
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Toward a Smarter Data Science
- Part II The Hidden Dimensions of Temporal Experience
- Chapter 6 The Many Windows of the House of the Past
- Chapter 7 Of Memory
- Chapter 8 The Distinctiveness of Certain Eras
- Chapter 9 The Measure of Influence
- Chapter 10 The Fit of Algorithms to Temporal Experience
- Chapter 11 Whither Modernity
- Chapter 12 Attacks on Environmentalists in Congress
- Part III Disciplinary Implications
- Appendix: Notes on Data, Code, Labor, Room for Error, and British History
- Index
Summary
This chapter will show how text mining can enable us to peer into the relationships between individuals, as opposed to studying moments in time. Reviewing a famous case study that focuses on the French debates in the era of the French Revolution, this chapter reviews the proposal that text mining can discern individuals whose speech was most influential on their generation. The chapter discusses the information theory that lies at the base of the French Revolution study and applies it to a case study on Britain’s parliament. A critical review of the results demonstrates how the careers of Isaac Butt, William Gladstone, and Arthur Balfour took shape against different relationships to past and future. The chapter reviews the algorithm’s abstractions carefully and critically, raising important questions about what each metric shows.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dangerous Art of Text MiningA Methodology for Digital History, pp. 272 - 289Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023