Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word

Come back when you have some time – you’ll need about twenty minutes to watch this TED video about communication. I love this – but then you know I am a word nerd, and I love the way concepts are born and grow.

Computers have aided language analysis and taken it to lengths that were previously inconceivable. First, Deb Roy shows – with videos, graphs and cloud analysis – how his son learned to speak his first word.

He goes from there to what I would call “buzz analysis”, taking program content from cable television and correlating it to comments on public media – blogs, FaceBook, all kinds of public forums. The results are astonishing, and a great tool to understand the national psyche and how we think and process. This is amazing stuff.

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