Wine Review/Weinempfehlung (engl.)
In dieser Episode
Die Weinempfehlung ist eine verbreitete Textsorte, die zum Kauf des jeweiligen Weins anregen soll, indem sie seine markanten Eigenschaften hervorhebt. Zunächst scheint es daher so, als wäre ein solcher Text in hohem Maße vom subjektiven Geschmack der Kritikerin oder des Kritikers abhängig. Mit den Methoden der Digital Humanities ist es jedoch möglich, Weinempfehlungen in größerem Umfang zu analysieren und so allgemeine Trends in der Beschreibung und Bewertung von Weinprodukten herauszufiltern. Basierend auf einem Datensatz von über 130.000 Weinkritiken, spürt die Episode der Frage nach, ob unsere ästhetische Erfahrung womöglich doch bestimmten Regelmäßigkeiten unterworfen ist.
David Dunham ist Doktorand am Department of German Studies der Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Seine Dissertation befasst sich mit dem Stellenwert kleiner Formen in ausgewählten Periodika der Aufklärung und deren Beitrag zur Popularisierung statistischen Wissens. Mehr Informationen über Dunhams digitale Forschungsprojekte erhalten Sie unter davidwdunham.com.
In this Episode
The wine review is an everyday commercial text that tries to capture the unique qualities of a wine product. In a close reading, the text’s diction appears highly unique to the tasting experience of the critic. However, with new advances in technology, it has become possible to analyze these texts at a large scale and thus examine trends in the descriptive qualities that critics attribute to those wines. The finding of this episode is a data set of 130,000 wine reviews taken from the Wine Enthusiast magazine. Their computational analysis suggests that our aesthetic experiences may not be as impartial as we take them to be.
David Dunham is a graduate student in the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. His dissertation deals with the organization of small forms in Enlightenment journals and their interrelation with the development of statistical knowledge and practices. To learn about David’s further computational text-analysis projects, visit davidwdunham.com.
Special thanks to Guofeng Shi and Jeremy Kline for their contributions to David’s project.
Figure 1: The correlation of the points given by the critic to the length of the review in characters. As the number of points increases, the average length of the review also increases.
Figure 2: The correlation of the subjectivity score (assigned by Textblob) to the points assigned by the critic. The more often the critic uses subjective terms, the average score increases by a marginal amount.
Figure 3: The correlation of the sentiment scores (assigned by Textblob) to the price of the wine. The results show little correlation between these two values.
Figure 4: The correlation of the points assigned by the critic and the price of the wine. Wines with higher scores are much more likely to have a higher market value. The lower the score, the lower the market value.
Bibliography
Datasets
Asuncion, A. & Newman, D.J. (2007). UCI Machine Learning Repository [http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/MLRepository.html]. Irvine, CA: University of California, School of Information and Computer Science. http://mlr.cs.umass.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/wine-quality/
Thoutt, Zack (2017). Wine Reviews: 130k wine reviews with variety, location, winery, price, and description. Available from Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/zynicide/wine-reviews/home.
Secondary Literature
Hay, Colin. “Globalisation and the Institutional Re-Embedding of Markets: The Political Economy of Price Formation in the Bordeaux En Primeur Market.” New Political Economy 12.2 (2007): 185–209. Web.
Langewiesche, William. “The Million-Dollar Nose.” The Atlantic Dec. 2000. Print.
Lukacs, Paul. Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012. Print.
McCoy, Elin. The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste. New York: Ecco, 2005. Print.
Parker, Robert. Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide. 6th ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Print.
Pethes, Nicolas, and Susanne Düwell. “Das Archiv Der Aufklärung: Fallsammlungen Und Bevölkerungsstatistik in Der Berlinischen Monatsschrift (1783-96).” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte und deutsche Literatur 40.1 (2015): 21–45. Print.