Visualizing character profile shifts in English texts over the centuries

Using a very simple measure of texts, we have previously distinguished the language of a text. Here we look at English texts in different time periods to show the progression of one language over time. Again we rely on a visual presentation of results, using our existing tools to present a multidimensional scaling (MDS) picture of the results.

Measurement studies need to have an explanation: We offer a simple and systematic explanation for both the language-to-language differences, and the within-language variation, based on the ideas of ‘Gravity’ which pulls same-language texts together, and ‘Spread’ which allows different-language texts to be far apart in the measured space.

Hence we get a study that is both supported by data and a very simple measurement, visually presented, on the one hand, and represented by a simple and systematic explanation, on the other hand.