Practice question · Multiple choice
An n-gram chart shows 'liberty' declining sharply after 1800. Why is that not yet evidence that liberty mattered less?
Hints
- Ask whether a concept has exactly one word.
- The count is of a string. What did you want to count?
Show the answer
C. Because word frequency tracks vocabulary, not concepts
Why
Counting a token is not counting an idea, and concepts migrate between words as registers shift, so a curve is a hypothesis about vocabulary that needs reading to test. Options 2 to 4 name real technical problems that better data would fix; this one does not go away with a bigger corpus.
Practise Digital Humanities and Big Data
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More questions on Digital Humanities and Big Data
- Why is "metadata is an argument" more than a slogan?
- Complete the principle.
- Sort each task by whether computation or a human reader does it better.
- Why is the OCR floor more dangerous than a simple gap in coverage?
- Why does a full-text archive quietly narrow what historians end up writing about?
- Which are genuine achievements of computational history?
- A large digitized corpus can be treated as a representative sample of the archive.