Culturomics and Construction Grammar

This ACDH lecture by Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya examines the development and limitations of culturomics, an approach that uses large-scale textual data to investigate cultural trends. While resources such as Google Books have enabled researchers to analyse vast quantities of text, challenges including unreliable metadata and OCR errors affect the quality of such research. The lecture also questions approaches that treat language primarily as sequences of individual tokens and introduces construction grammar as a way to capture more complex linguistic structures and enrich quantitative cultural analysis.

Learning Outcomes

After watching this video, learners will be able to:

• explain the basic principles and limitations of culturomics
• identify challenges associated with analysing large-scale textual datasets
• describe how construction grammar can enrich quantitative analysis of cultural and linguistic patterns

ACDH Lecture