THE DADAMETER

Imagine a world of transparency where all desires are negotiated on a global market and their risks are evaluated and optimized.

The Dadameter is a tool for the profiling of language at large scale and the historical tracking of artistic and literary movements. It brings about a new alliance between art, science and global finance.

Although this map could be used to locate any couple of words, the main objective is to define different zones of language, using the three criteria mentionned above: Homophony, Google Similarity (semantic relatedness) and Equivocation. By considering the different boundaries of each coefficient we can build regions which have quite simple interpretations:

Homophony - High homophony region.
Wasteland - Low relatedness: couples of words that are barely used in the same contexts and have very few in common. A zone from where new significations and surprises emerge (friche or jachère in french).
Mainstream - High relatedness: words are strongly correlated to each others and everything is very predictable.
Utilitarianism - Low equivocation: each word has a univocal meaning and there is no place for ambiguity.
At the end of the Mainstream region lies the kingdom of Boredom.

Finding precise boundaries for these different zones is for the moment an impossible task. We just don't know how to define scales, separating what is big from what is small. The Equivocation Separation Line that delimits the high equivocation zone from the low equivocation zone is not therefore very precisely located and it is not our aim to claim that we have localized it with accuracy.

A region of particular interest is the one with high homophony, high relatedness and high equivocation. This is what we called the Dada region and it was the starting point of our sudy. It is the red region at the top left of the map. If this zone is big, then mankind is very Roussellian or Dada. Of course Dada is not limited to this region and goes beyond the range of this map

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