Just learned about this cool new tool, and a nifty idea for using it, from Idiosophy:
"A research team at the Oxford English Dictionary has released a visualization engine for text analysis. This is fun: give it a text (up to 500 words, for the moment) and it will make a graph showing how common the word is in English (vertical axis), the year the word entered the English language (horizontal axis), the frequency of each word in the sample (size of the circle), and the language group from which we got the word (color).
This can be used for lots of things. We can test (for example) J.R.R. Tolkien’s success at excluding any word from later than 1600 from his prose."
Here's what I got from running some descriptions of Orthanc (taken from http://www.henneth-annun.net/places_view.cfm?plid=87 with citations omitted):
The purple dots are "tower" (circa 1000) and "ent" (circa 1900) - I think we can discount the visualizer's categorization of the latter.
The yellow dots are "pier", "cut" (verb), "wrap" (verb), and "tall."
2 comments:
"Embrasure" was the word that struck me as incongruous in that description. I guess it's hard to avoid french words when you're writing about military affairs. Is it the red dot at 1700?
Yes, it is.
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