Video: The essential meaning of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece novel, Les Misérables, presented as an “ousiometric trajectory.” (VIDEO)
Caption
Scientists at the University of Vermont have looked at the real-world use of billions of words and discovered that language is fundamentally structured by the need for safety and survival. As part of this research, the team created a new tool for distilling and studying the meaning of large texts called an “ousiometer”—a remote sensing instrument for looking at meaning, in the same way that a telescope is a remote sensing instrument for stars. Using this approach, the scientists have explored many types of texts from Twitter to talk radio, from the New York Times to Harry Potter novels. This video shows one way of visualizing this information as an “ouisiometric trajectory.” Within this overall “safety bias” of language, the researchers show that meaning is best described by three independent dimensions: power (weak vs. powerful), danger (safe vs. dangerous), and structure (ordered vs. chaotic). The large graph shows how the language and story within Hugo’s novel shifts between these dimensions, with a notable weight of the trajectory moving in the territory around “safe” and “good” though with notable forays toward “aggressive.” The smaller graphs surrounding the main one reveal individual poles of overall meaning, e.g., shifting pattern of meaning between “dangerous” and “safe” words as reading time advances. “A full analysis of our ousiometric time series for Les Misérables is well beyond the scope of our present work,” the teams writes. “Our purpose here is simply to show that we can readily build an ousiometer for large-scale texts.”
Credit
University of Vermont
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