Google Books Ngram Viewer in Socio-Cultural Research

The objective of this paper is to verify if Google Books Ngram Viewer, a new tool working on a database of 361 billion words in English, and enabling quick recovery of data on word frequency in a diachronic perspective, is indeed valuable to socio-cultural research as suggested by its creators (Michel et al. 2010), i.e. the Cultural Observatory, Harvard University, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Google. In the paper we introduce a study performed by Greenfield (2013), who applies the program to her Ecological Analysis, and contrast the findings with a study based on similar premises, in which we follow the trends in changes in word frequency throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to observe if these changes correspond to one of the major socio-cultural transformations that took place in the studied period, i.e. mediatization. The results of this study open a discussion on the usefulness of the program in socio-cultural research

La infoesfera y el proyecto GDELT

The dizzying expansion of the mass media and information technologies in recent decades has given shape to new cultural configurations. One of the most current expressions of these processes is Big Data. This phenomenon has transformed many of the economic, social and political processes with which it has interacted. In the field of social sciences, new objects of study emerged such as Social Networks or the Web, while new data analysis techniques were incorporated. Considering this context, the present work intends to relate the concept of Infosphere, considered by Franco Berardi as the circular space in which signals carrying cultural intention transit, and the development of the sub-field of Social Sciences known as Culturomics 2.0. In order to visualize some of the conceptual tensions, a case study on the GDELT Project will be carried out. Its function is to monitor the messages that circulate in the Digital Mass Media and Social Networks; in order to create an open platform in real time that allows to investigate the events, dreams, fears and conflicts that occur around the world today