In TV and movies men talk more than women, and women talk mostly about men. Hence the Bechdel test. But I thought I’d do a dataviz for this phenomenon using Ben Schmidt’s implementation of Bookworm. His data scraper uses the Open Subtitles database of closed captioned subtitles for hundreds of TV shows. While it can’t […]
My nasty “cold” has been diagnosed as Influenza A, so it’s bed rest for 48 hours. And, of course, blogging about why Ebola gets all the news but not good ‘ol killers like influenza. I got CDC figures for deaths and then ran Google searches for the related terms, totaling the number of hits. I was […]
The rise of digital humanities suggests the need to rethink some basic questions in quantitative history. Why, for example, should historians use regression analysis? The conventional answer is simple: regression analysis is a social science tool, and historians should use it to do social science history. But that is a limited and constraining answer. If […]