1 Counting Little Words in Big Data: The Psychology of Communities, Culture, and History

Language can provide a window into individuals, families, and their community and culture, and, at the broadest level into history. Words are the primary means by which we express our thoughts and feelings. They are what we use to communicate and archive our experience of events. Given the centrality of language, it is somewhat surprising that so few social scientists have relied on word analyses to understand basic social processes. The reason, of course, is that until the very end of the 20th century, large-scale word analyses were simply too difficult to do. With the simultaneous popularity of the desktop computer and the internet, researchers for the first time were able to explore natural language on a scale never imagined. Our approach to language has been to count words in a number of grammatical, psychological, and content categories using a computerized software program. The program was initially developed to understand psychological processes in individuals who had provided language samples in lab and clinical studies. In recent years, it has become a widely used tool for linguistic and literary studies, and for the analysis of social media data sets on the scale of billions of words in many languages and across hundreds of centuries. In this chapter, we begin by describing the development and initial applications o