WeAreTheKey

The art of radical linguistics is in sorting through the mess to find coherent patterns, and keeping track of whether the emotional tension around those patterns is building or releasing over time.

The technology is comprised of a database of roughly 750,000 words and phrases in various languages and alphabets. Each word is linked to a matrix of values that define the word as it relates to different qualities such as intensity, duration, and emotional direction...

This entire dictionary is then broken down into groups of increasingly finer granularity...

Out of this entire master lexicon, the time monks hand-select roughly 30 to 40 thousand words and phrases that seem to have the most current predictive value for the future. This list gets tuned between data-gathering runs to better reflect what concepts grew in strength, or started to drop off, in the previous analysis.

"Spiders" then crawl the web searching for those words, much in the same way Google goes about indexing the internet. When a word is found, the spiders grab a chunk of the surrounding text, and copy it into the database, and reduce it down to a set of numbers linking back to the words in the main, larger lexicon...

This is where the human part of Half Past Human really goes to work. By drilling down through the various layers and searching for shifts in language usage, such as new concepts appearing, existing ones growing stronger, or older concepts suddenly disappearing, they can begin forecast changes in the real world....

"Basically, the computer part doesn't matter. Humans are psychic -- they just may not know they're psychic. But even those who don't know they're psychic ‘leak out' information. We go and gather up the information that leaks out in their correspondence with Aunt Maggie and analyze it for patterns. We are more privy to the media hysteria after the event than to the event itself."