Home » Wikileaks Promises Text Messages: Corpus Linguistics Motherlode?

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Wikileaks Promises Text Messages: Corpus Linguistics Motherlode?

Submitted by casseia on Wed, 2009-11-18 00:59.

Holy crap. Wikileaks is said to be releasing more than HALF A MILLION intercepted "pager messages" from the days following 9/11/2001. This could be huge -- or a complete boondoggle, depending on how it is organized. Now, apart from the ginormous question of who is intercepting and archiving private text messages...

Corpus linguistics is a branch of applied linguistics that analyzes huge volumes of language looking for patterns. People who do corpus linguistics use "concordancers" or software that can quickly search for words and strings of words and display the context in which they are used. I would LOVE to get my hands on texts from the New York and DC areas for the day of the attack -- I wouldn't expect any kind of orgasmic denouement ("Ari, our controlled demolition of the towers went perfectly -- please let the peeps in Herzliya know. Love, Schmueli") but as with the oral histories of the firefighters, there could be reports of explosions and other "anomalous" events.

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=da&...

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=da&...

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