The Joy of Data | movie | 2016 | Official Clip - video Dailymotion

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A witty and mind-expanding exploration of data, with mathematician Dr Hannah Fry. This high-tech romp reveals what data  | dG1fVE9MQ251bXZGdmc

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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:03 What it means to receive a signal

00:10 is to be less uncertain than you were before.

00:13 And so another way to think of measuring or quantifying

00:16 a signal is in that change in uncertainty.

00:21 Using Shand's mathematics to quantify signals

00:24 is common in the world of complexity science.

00:27 But it's rather less familiar to historians.

00:31 I love maths.

00:32 I love its precision.

00:33 I love its beauty.

00:34 I absolutely love its certainty.

00:46 And that, Simon, can bring that mathematical world

00:52 view, that mathematical certainty, to what I work with.

00:57 The reason behind this remarkable marriage

00:59 between history and science is the analysis

01:03 of the largest single body of digital text

01:06 ever collated about ordinary people.

01:10 It's the Proceedings of London's Old Bailey,

01:13 the central criminal court of England and Wales,

01:15 which hosted close to 200,000 trials between 1674 and 1913.

01:23 There are 127 million words of everyday speech

01:28 in the mouths of orphans and women and servants

01:32 and ne'er-do-wells of criminals, certainly,

01:36 but also people from every rank and station in society.

01:40 And that made them unique.

01:43 What's exciting about the Old Bailey

01:45 and the size of the data set, the length,

01:47 the magnitude of it, is that not only can we detect a signal,

01:51 but we're able to look at that signal's emergence over time.

01:57 Shannon's mathematics can be used

01:59 to capture the amount of information

02:02 in every single word.

02:04 And like the alphabet, the less you expect a word,

02:07 the more bits of information it carries.

02:11 So, imagine that you walk into a courtroom at the time

02:14 and you hear a single word.

02:16 The question we ask is, how much information

02:19 does that word carry about the nature of the crime being tried?

02:25 You hear the word "the."

02:28 It's common across all trials,

02:30 and so it gives you no bits of information.

02:34 Most words you hear are poor signals of what's going on.

02:39 But then you hear "purse."

02:42 It conveys real information.

02:46 Then comes "coin," "grab," and "struck."

02:51 The more rarer a word, the more bits of information it carries,

02:56 the stronger the signal becomes.

03:00 One of the clearest signals that we see in the Old Bailey,

03:03 one of the clearest processes that comes out,

03:04 is something that is known as the civilizing process.

03:08 It's an increasing sensitivity to and attention to

03:13 the distinction between violence and nonviolent crime.

03:20 If, for example, somebody hit you and stole your handkerchief,

03:25 in an 18th century context, in 1780,

03:28 you would concentrate on the handkerchief,

03:30 more worried about a few pence worth of dirty linen

03:35 than the fact that somebody just broke your nose or cracked a rib.

03:38 The fact that 100 years later, by 1880,

03:43 every concern, every focus,

03:45 both in terms of the words used in court,

03:48 but also in terms of what people were brought to court for,

03:51 focused on that broken nose and that cracked rib,

03:54 speaks to a fundamental change in how we think about the world

03:59 and how we think about how social relations work.

04:03 Look at the strongest word signals for violent crime across the period.

04:09 In the 18th century, the age of the highwaymen,

04:12 words relating to property theft dominate.

04:16 But by the 20th century, it's physical violence itself

04:20 and the impact on the victim that carry the most weight.

04:27 That notion that one can trace change over time

04:30 by looking at language and how it's used,

04:32 who deploys it, in what context,

04:34 that I think gives this kind of work its real power.

04:38 There are billions of words.

04:39 There's all of Google Books.

04:41 There is every printed newspaper.

04:43 There is every speech made in Parliament,

04:46 every sermon given at most churches.

04:49 All of it is suddenly data and capable of being analyzed.

The Joy of Data | movie | 2016 | Official Clip

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