Searching for the Great Chain of Being Using Google Print

Abstract

Luciano Floridi coined the term “ideometry” in 1995, as a new approach for analyzing large corpora of text and finding hidden patterns. However, the technology for implementing this approach was lacking until now. With the arrival of Google Print, we now have a large-scale online library for research. On another front, Lovejoy argued in 1933 that ideas evolve from each other in a “Chain of Being” and that there is a small number of “unit ideas” that compose all great ideas through history. Since then there has been much debate about the pros and cons of this theory. Ideometry, using Google Print, may provide clarifying insights.

Keywords:

• co-occurrence
• Google Print
• history of ideas
• ideometry
• information retrieval