Jean-Baptiste Michel helped develop quantitative analysis of large digitized text collections. He is a lead and corresponding author of the study introducing culturomics, which examined changes in language and recorded culture using a large book corpus.[ref]
A central measurement is relative word frequency: occurrences of a word or phrase in books assigned to a year are normalized by the number of corresponding word sequences in that year's corpus. A raw count can rise merely because more text was digitized. For an elementary illustration, one hundred occurrences among a million tokens and two hundred among four million tokens represent a halving of relative frequency, despite the doubled count.
The data measure the contents of a sampled textual archive. Book selection, date metadata and recognition errors can affect the apparent history of a word; frequency is not a direct measurement of how many people held a belief. The study's contribution was to make large-scale temporal comparisons computationally tractable and quantitatively inspectable, while exposing the importance of the observation process.[ref]
Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books by Jean-Baptiste Michel and others. Corpus construction and quantitative examples
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