Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
Behav Res Methods. 2019 Aug;51(4):1864-1877. doi: 10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6.
The recent rise in digitized historical text has made it possible to quantitatively study our psychological past. This involves understanding changes in what words meant, how words were used, and how these changes may have responded to changes in the environment, such as in healthcare, wealth disparity, and war. Here we make available a tool, the Macroscope, for studying historical changes in language over the last two centuries. The Macroscope uses over 155 billion words of historical text, which will grow as we include new historical corpora, and derives word properties from frequency-of-usage and co-occurrence patterns over time. Using co-occurrence patterns, the Macroscope can track changes in semantics, allowing researchers to identify semantically stable and unstable words in historical text and providing quantitative information about changes in a word's valence, arousal, and concreteness, as well as information about new properties, such as semantic drift. The Macroscope provides information about both the local and global properties of words, as well as information about how these properties change over time, allowing researchers to visualize and download data in order to make inferences about historical psychology. Although quantitative historical psychology represents a largely new field of study, we see this work as complementing a wealth of other historical investigations, offering new insights and new approaches to understanding existing theory. The Macroscope is available online at http://www.macroscope.tech .
数字化历史文本的兴起使得对我们的心理过去进行定量研究成为可能。这涉及到理解词汇含义的变化、词汇的使用方式以及这些变化如何应对环境变化，例如医疗保健、贫富差距和战争。在这里，我们提供了一个工具，Macroscope，用于研究过去两个世纪语言的历史变化。Macroscope 使用了超过 1550 亿个历史文本单词，随着我们纳入新的历史语料库，这个数字还会不断增加，并从随时间变化的使用频率和共现模式中得出词汇属性。通过共现模式，Macroscope 可以跟踪语义变化，使研究人员能够识别历史文本中语义稳定和不稳定的词汇，并提供有关词汇的褒贬、兴奋和具体性变化的定量信息，以及有关新属性的信息，例如语义漂移。Macroscope 提供有关词汇局部和全局属性的信息，以及这些属性随时间变化的信息，使研究人员能够可视化和下载数据，以便对历史心理学进行推断。虽然定量历史心理学代表了一个全新的研究领域，但我们认为这项工作是对其他大量历史研究的补充，为理解现有理论提供了新的见解和新的方法。Macroscope 可在 http://www.macroscope.tech 上在线获取。
