Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture by Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel

Author:Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel [Aiden, Erez]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

One of the circle’s favorite examples was the word Volksgeist, “spirit of the people.” Volksgeist was supposed to refer to a nation’s collective consciousness and memory, to what the nation was like and what it had on its mind. Volksgeist was exactly the sort of imprecise, unmeasurable concept that irritated the circle, so the group highlighted the term in its 1929 manifesto, hoping to banish it from language altogether.

The Vienna Circle’s idea-animus was less a matter of political censorship and more a matter of its philosophical attitude toward the boundaries of science.

At the time, the circle may have been right. Ideas like collective memory have long stood outside the purview of scientific investigation. But with ngrams at our disposal, probing a concept like collective memory seems less improbable. Can we measure collective memory, the same way that we might test the memory of a single person?

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