Don Draper Meets Big Data

Among the best things about covering advances in big data analysis is you begin bumping into big data concepts in all sorts of unexpected places.

Witness this recent episode of the Slate podcast "Lexicon Valley" on verbal anachronisms in the TV shows Mad Men and Downton Abbey.

Host Mike Vuolo spoke with Princeton graduate student Ben Scmhidt, who uses a database of select scanned works (read: unstructured data) from the Google Books collection to pick out anachronisms in period TV shows, films and novels. Schmidt’s software feeds lines from the period pieces into his database to determine whether the same phrase appears in contemporary works from the era being presented. He can get through an entire episode of Downton Abbey in a matter of minutes, he said.

One interesting conclusion: Period writers are very good at avoiding anachronisms when writing dialogue about culture and technology but much less adept when it comes to business speech. Schmidt theorizes this is because we tend to think of technology being in a constant state of change. The same goes for developing cultural mores such as gender and race relations. So we tend to note significant changes and associate them with a particular year or period.

That’s why it’s easy to spot an anachronism such as the phrase “ice princess” -- which only entered common usage well into the feminist movement -- as out of place in the short-lived ABC drama Pan Am set in the early 1960s, Schmidt said.

We tend to think of business as more of a constant, he theorizes, and to not notice significant shifts in the way we talk about it. That’s why terms such as “deal breaker,” “focus group” and “leverage” as a verb that didn’t become common until the ‘70s and ‘80s are always creeping into Mad Men dialogue while the show’s cultural dialogue tends to be scrupulously appropriate.