Cultural Computing at Literature Scale: Encoding the Cultural Knowledge of Tens of Billions of Words of Academic Literature

Use the link to access the full text article from D-Lib Magazine.  "The vast array of academic literature published by the humanities and social sciences disciplines codifies our collective scholarly understanding of how societies function and the beliefs, ideals, and ethnic, religious, and tribal contexts that undergird global societal behavior, yet this material has been largely absent from the recent computational revolution in the study of culture. Applying temporal, geographic, thematic, and citation algorithms to an archive of more than 21 billion words spanning 1.5 million publications from 7 collections, including the entire contents of JSTOR, DTIC, CORE, CiteSeerX, and the Internet Archive's 1.6 billion PDFs, academic literature is seen to offer a powerful new lens onto global culture. Four case studies demonstrate using this archive to map the Nuer ethnic group and identify its top experts, map the literature on food and water security, explore the thematic underpinnings of the Rwandan genocide, and construct a network over the ethnic groups of the world as seen through the combined academic literature of the past half century."