[Noisebridge-discuss] [HAIRSPLITTING] Re: 5 geek fallacies

[Michael Shiloh]

Is there a word for the practice of using Google to acquire a feeling 
for relative popularity?

Professor Feinschmeker

Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson wrote:
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> On Feb 26, 2010, at 3:39 PM, Jesse Zbikowski wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:56 PM, Sai Emrys <noisebridge at saizai.com>  
>> wrote:
>>> Unlike your search, Seth's is not attempting to use popularity to
>>> determine historical facts, but to determine the *popularity* of a
>>> collocation.
>> Well, the idea was to determine the *correctness* of the collocation,
>> not how many times it's been repeated on the Internet. Trial By Google
>> represents a familiar kind of confirmation bias: you form a
>> hypothesis, and test it in a way that can only turn up supporting
>> evidence. People may well employ this collocation, but that does not
>> preclude the possibility that there is a different and preferred
>> construction which doesn't reveal itself in such a search.
>>
>> All kidding aside, there are a number of forums (mainly geared toward
>> non-native English speakers) which can offer much more satisfying
>> analyses of grammatical questions, for the truly curious. However I
>> suppose meta-grammatical discussions along the lines of "does grammar
>> have a logical and prescriptive component, or does it merely describe
>> how people use language" are more or less par for this list.
> 
> Grammatical analysis and descriptive linguistics are different though:  
> certainly, one could seek out an appropriate language geeks forum, and  
> sit down for erudite analysis of what the current models for  
> describing English grammar or word usage make of a given phrase; but  
> this ends up being a comparatively prescriptive approach relying on  
> the preciseness of past analyses.
> 
> What Seth was doing is something I've often seen linguistics  
> researcher do (and even cite in research reports) - namely use Google  
> to acquire a feeling for relative popularity of different  
> collocations. It's a cheap and low labour approach to what otherwise  
> means either digging through a couple of thousand newspapers (or other  
> textual corpus source) by hand, or - preferred to that - using an  
> already established corpus; which tend to come with licenses that make  
> them less than accessible for casual research.
> 
> Sure, it has confirmation bias. But on the other hand, is [Noisebridge- 
> discuss] really a venue you expect peer-review grade research from?
> 
> 
> Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Dr.rer.nat
> Postdoctoral researcher
> mik at math.stanford.edu
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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