Kulturom

Kulturom is a term used in digital humanities to describe the quantitative study of culture through large-scale, digitized data sources. It is closely related to culturomics and is sometimes used as a variant or shorthand in discussions of data-driven cultural analysis. The core idea is to extract cultural signals from vast corpora such as digitized books, newspapers, or social media, then analyze trends over time.

The concept emerged from the broader movement of culturomics, which applies computational methods to cultural artifacts to map how language, ideas, and social phenomena evolve. While culturomics gained prominence with published studies in the early 2010s, kulturom as a term has appeared in various academic and popular discussions as a way to describe similar methodologies or localized translations of the concept.

Methods commonly associated with kulturom include corpus linguistics, frequency analysis, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and network analysis. Data sources range from large digitized text collections to modern social media streams, with attention paid to issues of data quality, representativeness, and temporal resolution. Researchers seek patterns such as shifts in word usage, emergence of topics, and correlations with historical events.

Applications span language change, cultural memory, public discourse, and historical research, offering macro-level insights into how cultures respond to events, technologies, and social change. Critics note limitations related to sampling bias, the non-representativeness of digital corpora, and challenges in interpreting quantitative signals as cultural meaning. See also culturomics, digital humanities, Google Books Ngram Viewer.