Equivocation
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Dadameter is an art project by French artist Christophe Bruno. It was inspired by the work of the french writer Raymond Roussel use of homophony described in How I Wrote Certain of My Books.
In the words of the artist "the project is a satire about the recent transmutation of language into a global market ruled by Google et al. and uses the most up-to-date technologies of control to draw cartographies of language at large scale."
It was co-produced by the Rencontres Paris-Berlin-Madrid 2008 for contemporary art and new cinema and programmed by Valeriu Lacatusu.
The result of the project is the so-called Dadamap in which each pixel corresponds to one couple of words. The project started from "a lexicon of several thousands of words which correspond to about 800,000 couples (as many pixels then), and we looked for homophonic correlations, as in billard / pillard [see Roussel], or for semantic correlations."
The procedure provides three measurements for each couple of words corresponding to homophony (the Damerau-Levenshtein distance), Google Similarity (or semantic relatedness) and thirdly equivocation (to which extent a word has a univocal meaning or at the contrary is polysemic or equivocal).
