Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

Fractals and Scaling (2021)

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4.2 An Initial Example: Word Frequency » Video (9:41) Word frequencies Download Video Subtitles & Transcripts Slides for this lecture


The Moby Dick data can be obtained at http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~aaronc/powerlaws/data.htm.  These data are analyzed and discussed some in the following two papers:

  • Clauset, Aaron, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, and Mark EJ Newman. "Power-law distributions in empirical data." SIAM review 51.4 (2009): 661-703. [pdf]

  • Newman, Mark EJ. "Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law." Contemporary physics 46.5 (2005): 323-351. [pdf]