stéfan sinclair :: scribblings & musings

Deborah Friedell wrote an interesting mini-essay entitled “The Word Crunchers” in the New York Times Book Review last weekend (free registration required, see Bugmenot for logins). Friedall presents a solid, if extremely brief, history of quantitative text analysis, especially of the concordancing flavour. Much of the discussion seems to be in preparation for mentioning Amazon’s concordancing features, and in particular its Statistically Improbable Phrases feature that one can access when browsing certain books. The end of the article is remarkable, perhaps because it suggests that the author might not realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Once it would have seemed unnecessary to point out that a statistical tool has no ear for allusions, for echoes, for metrical and musical effects, for any of the attributes that make words worth reading. Today, perhaps it bears reminding.