The digital history of the anglophone vocabulary of psychology: An exploration using Zipfian methods.

Abstract

The digital humanities are being applied with increasing frequency to the analysis of historically important texts. In this study, the methods of G. K. Zipf are used to explore the digital history of the vocabulary of psychology. Zipf studied a great many phenomena, from word frequencies to city sizes, showing that they tend to have a characteristic distribution in which there are a few cases that occur very frequently and many more cases that occur very infrequently. We find that the number of new words and word senses that writers contribute to the vocabulary of psychology have such a Zipfian distribution. Moreover, those who make the most contributions, such as William James, tend also to invent new metaphorical senses of words rather than new words. By contrast, those who make the fewest contributions tend to invent entirely new words. The use of metaphor makes a text easier for a reader to understand. While the use of new words requires more effort on the part of the reader, it may lead to more precise understanding than does metaphor. On average, new words and word senses become a part of psychology's vocabulary in the time leading up to World War I, suggesting that psychology was "finding its language" (Danziger, 1997) during this period.

Vocabulary sharing among subjects belonging to the hierarchy of sciences

“…For purposes of the present study, earlier versions of the vocabularies of biology, chemistry, computing, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, physics, and psychology from Benjafield (2012Benjafield ( , 2013Benjafield ( , 2014Benjafield ( , 2016Benjafield ( , 2019a were updated using the OED Online (2020). The vocabularies of astronomy, economics, political science, and sociology were newly assembled for this study, also using the OED Online (2020).…”

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

“…My intuition is that this would be a fundamental misunderstanding; a difference in investigative kind between history and psychology. Yet when used to identify opportunities, such insights do certainly produce fascinating investigations (e.g., Benjafield, 2016Benjafield, , 2017 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.…”

Meaning-Change Through the Mistaken Mirror: On the Indeterminacy of “Wundt” and “Piaget” in Translation

“…Excluding it from our analyses is therefore not only necessary for practical reasons, related to a distrust of the underlying data, but it is also very useful: we do not want to be blinded by its influence, and—if it is indeed the equivalent of Wundt’s Grundzüge —the omission will mean that our illustrations will not be compressed by its relatively large “n” (consistent with Zipf’s Law; cf. Benjafield, 2016).…”

“…My goal, in the manipulations that follow, is therefore to reduce this to “white noise” (a slope of 0). The difference and why it matters, very briefly, is akin to that between complexity and randomness: one can be productively investigated for underlying causes, and the other cannot (see also Benjafield, 2016, pp. 135–136).…”