The transmission of ideas requires a collaborative communication network. For hundreds of years, this was in the form of letters. Now this letter communication can be tracked an analyzed.

One example is the Republic of Letters

Culturomics was started in 2010

Quantitative Culture

Predicting Future Cultural Behavior


    Abstract: News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events. Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30-year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden's likely hiding place as a 200 kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world's cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as "news is becoming more negative" and "American news portrays a U.S.-centric view of the world" are found to have merit.

    This is a potentially a pretty big deal. Indeed, right now your generations entire social media presence is being turned into a giant target marketing campaign which is working quite well.


An example waveform:

Not that this is not smoothed and therefore emphasizes the noise instead of the trend. This is a mistake by these authors. The downward trend towards more negative tone starting in Jan 05 is taken as evidence of "predicting" the revolution in Egypt.




A similar trend is seen for Tunisia:



Evidence for increasingly negative tone of the world news is very strong.



More Examples of Digital Humanities:

Word Usage Patterns



The visualization of ideas and connections - not enough pixel space to properly show:



The Graph of Ideas

Mapping social media and information sources onto geography:



Digital Representation of Emancipation events during the civil war

Concept Maps:





Big Concept Map

Make your own concept maps:

Text 2 Mind