We believe these correspondences empirically demonstrate the usefulness of this technique. There are a number of theoretical problems with this approach to tracking ideas and cultural items that will be discussed in the presentation. Whatever the degree to which the WWW reflects popular culture there are enough people authoring WWW pages to argue that it is interesting what they are writing about if one can accurately measure it. This is a problem common to any form of text-analysis. Certain cultural topoi are no doubt not going to be tracked by a system that searches only for words and phrases, that is what cultural historians are for.
Disambiguation is another problem.
That said, we believe that information about key words and phrases over time could provide useful evidence for more sophisticated interpretation and aggregation if it can be shown to be something that can be gathered and if it can be shown to reflect real events. Further, searching for key words and phrases is the way many people access information on the WWW so there is some justification for using this approach. Further, as mentioned above, the search engines are used to find information - they are part of the culture of the Internet and consequently would have to be taken into account anyway. Given the general climate of concern about the gathering and aggregation of data on the Internet it is worth asking whether this system or ones like it pose ethical problems. As we do not gather information about individual WWW pages or authors it is unlikely that such a system could be used to predict more than general trends, but the fact remains that systems like ours could be designed to track the interests of an individual author over time.