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For a word that you're investigating, the tool generates a table showing the words that occur in similar contexts as the queried-for word. Instead of entering the word in the search box, you can also enter the word directly into the browser (by adding ?q=[word] after the URL http://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/wordsim/nearest.html), like so:
http://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/wordsim/nearest.html?q=caste to have the queried-for word be "caste".
Here's an example of the kinds of useful observations the tool empowers you to make:
With the above query for "caste", that is,
http://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/wordsim/nearest.html?q=caste ,
http://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/wordsim/nearest.html?q=caste ,
you can notice a few interesting things: from the generated table for "caste", it appears that "suffering" was a pretty frequent contextual word for "caste" in the early nineteenth century, but then "suffering" seemed to drop out of the context by the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, "degradation" seemed to remain, more or less, part of the context of the word "caste" throughout. You can also notice that the occurrence of "race" in the same context as "caste" becomes more frequent after 1870 or so. Before 1870, the instances of "race" in the same context as "caste" was less pronounced.
HT+Bookworm
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