The written word is something most consider to be an art of some type. We spend innumerable hours dissecting writing, looking for invisible subtext and personal meaning behind the words. We write with little care of frequency of word use and its implications, instead with a flow ignorant of numeric values.

Then electronic text analysis exists in accordance with writing as a compound blend between art and science. This is by no means a bad thing, however, as text analysis sheds light on whatever patterns or codes the analyzer might be looking for. Adolphs stresses the importance of selecting a corpus to be examined. This makes sense of whatever one might be looking to find in textual analysis by limiting its field of view. By looking at religious texts, for example, one can analyze how frequent the word “divine” might surface and draw conclusions based on that knowledge, especially when compared with other selected words.

In 2011, a study was done on divorce causation in the UK, citing certain words as key players in such actions. The most prominent of which was found to be “Facebook,” popping up in one third of behavior petitions in divorce cases. What was revealed by this study was the finding that Facebook carries great weight as not only a relationship starter, but an ender as well.

This study also proves the point that word frequency in a corpus can hint at certain correlations. The word “the,” for example, usually comes up as the most frequently used word when filtered through electronic text analysis. Yet “the” alone holds no meaning and few conclusions can be drawn from that data. The frequency of “Facebook,” on the other hand, when paired with its origins in divorce filings, can point to the fact that certain words do hold meaning when their occurrence is frequent in a given corpus. Facebook does hold the position of a major player in divorces, it was found, due to the easy nature of being able to communicate with those outside of a relationship. This fact, paired with the lack of privacy and security on Facebook make it a force against faithful marriage.

WordMining, a form of frequency in text analysis, is a popular form of visually outlining which words are used most in a given work. Here is an example found of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.