Kalev Leetaru describes a summary of the emerging field of Culturomics. It gives priority to analyzing the context and tone ofthe imperfect information available to people at the time we take social action, especially as news media capture a snapshot of the real–time public information environment.
He argues that Culturomics complements the “digested history” of scholars and other writers about the past.
Today, news produced and consumed online in the world accounts for nearly half of the news monitored by Western intelligence agencies.
He argues that computerized measuring and analyzing the tone of these vast digital archieves permits forecasting many broad social behaviors, ranging from revolutions, box office sales to the stock market itself.
I wonder how educators use these data in teacher prep schools and what implications it these data have for curricula, at least for content taught?
Leetaru is Assistant Director for Text and Digital Media Analytics at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois and Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Among his research areas are “big data” analysis using massive text archives, and he has a book surveying the field of computational content analysis coming from Routledge in Fall 2011. E–mail: leetaru [at] illinois [dot] edu
