Using the Web as a Measure of Familiarity and Obscurity

In this article, we explore the structure of the web as an indicator of popular culture. In a series of art and technology installations, the software agency needs to keep ‘grounded’ to what people can readily understand. We administered a survey to understand how people perceived word and phrase obscurity related with frequency information gathered from a popular Web search engine. We found the frequency data gathered from the engine closely matched judgments gathered from people. The results of this study point to a promising new area of research venturing out from a view of the Web as a tool for corpus linguistics, to its use in applications of art and science that provide compelling explorations of popular culture. Author