Our effort to understand Victorian books through a series of graphs about publication titles may lead new vistors to the site to mistakenly believe that we are uncritical quantifiers. But we are professional historians who treasure nuance and sophisticated interpretation, so we want to be explicit about some of our concerns about the limitations of our data and methodologies.
First, we are well aware that the meaning of words change over time, as does word choice. “Science,” for instance, starts the long nineteenth century as an expansive term not so far from “knowledge,” but ends the era with a more narrow focus on the natural sciences. “Evil” might be a theme of Victorian thought but not necessarily the term most frequently used by authors when they discuss the subject.
Second, different ways of viewing our raw data will present different biases. The first study we ran was solely about word use in titles; undoubtedly we’ll get different charts when we run the same terms against the full texts of the same books. Furthermore, we plan to acquire the context around words (what Google calls “snippets”), which will allow for a much more fine-grained analysis, helping to determine whether a word was used in a positive or negative sense. We also recognize that artifacts of publishing shape the charts, and therefore limit the extent to which they can be representative of larger cultural interests.
Finally, we want to emphasize that the methods explored here will complement, rather than replace, close reading. It does not pretend to be a substitute for understanding the nuances of meaning that humanists enjoy. But it does present a new way of looking at the data and suggests some new questions. Indeed, we have already made some unexpected connections between the bird’s eye view of title data, texts of specific books, and the historical context from which they came.
We hope you will take a similarly cautious view of the contents of this site, but also share our enthusiasm for its promise. And of course we welcome and encourage your comments and criticisms.