Culturomics meets random fractal theory: Insights into long-range correlations of social and natural phenomena over the past two centuries
arXiv:1202.5299 · doi:10.1098/rsif.2011.0846
Abstract
Culturomics was recently introduced as the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Here we make use of this data by investigating fluctuations in yearly usage frequencies of specific words that describe social and natural phenomena, as derived from books that were published over the course of the past two centuries. We show that the determination of the Hurst parameter by means of fractal analysis provides fundamental insights into the nature of long-range correlations contained in the culturomic trajectories, and by doing so, offers new interpretations as to what might be the main driving forces behind the examined phenomena. Quite remarkably, we find that social and natural phenomena are governed by fundamentally different processes. While natural phenomena have properties that are typical for processes with persistent long-range correlations, social phenomena are better described as nonstationary, on-off intermittent, or Levy walk processes.
arXiv comment8 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Journal of the Royal Society Interface [data available at http://books.google.com/ngrams]
References in corpus (17)
- Understanding individual human mobility patterns
- Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis of nonstationary time series
- The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics
- Multiscale mobility networks and the large scale spreading of infectious diseases
- Multifractality in Human Heartbeat Dynamics
- Modeling the scaling properties of human mobility
- Effect of Trends on Detrended Fluctuation Analysis
- Understanding the spreading patterns of mobile phone viruses
- Scale Invariance in the Nonstationarity of Physiological Signals
- Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity
- Effect of nonlinear filters on detrended fluctuation analysis
- Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories
- Traffic-driven Epidemic Spreading in Finite-size Scale-Free Networks
- Structural and Dynamical Patterns on Online Social Networks: the Spanish May 15th Movement as a case study
- Who is the best player ever? A complex network analysis of the history of professional tennis
- WiFi Epidemiology: Can Your Neighbors' Router Make Yours Sick?
- Spreading of Persistent Infections in Heterogeneous Populations
Cited by in corpus (10)
- Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
- Comparing the performance of FA, DFA and DMA using different synthetic long-range correlated time series
- Stochastic model for the vocabulary growth in natural languages
- Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death
- Scaling Laws in Human Language
- Long-Range Correlations and Memory in the Dynamics of Internet Interdomain Routing
- Multiscale permutation entropy analysis of laser beam wandering in isotropic turbulence
- Analysis of the autocorrelation function for time series with higher-order temporal correlations: An exponential case
- Subdiffusive semantic evolution in Indo-European languages
- Relations between anomalous diffusion and fluctuation scaling: The case of ultraslow diffusion and time-scale-independent fluctuation scaling in language