"Princeton computer scientists have developed a new way of tracing the origins and spread of ideas, a technique that could make it easier to gauge the influence of notable scholarly papers, buzz-generating news stories and other information sources. The method relies on computer algorithms to analyze how language morphs over time within a group of documents -- whether they are research papers on quantum physics or blog posts about politics -- and to determine which documents were the most influential. (...) "We're trying to make sense of how concepts move around. Maybe you want to know who coined a certain term like 'quark,' or search old news stories to find out where the first 1960s antiwar protest took place." Blei said the new search technique might one day be used by historians, political scientists and other scholars to study how ideas arise and spread. (...) Instead of focusing on citations, Blei and Sean Gerrish, a Princeton doctoral student in computer science, developed a statistical model that allows computers to analyze the actual text of documents to see how the language changes over time. Influential documents in a field will establish new concepts and terms that change the patterns of words and phrases used in later works. (...) "We are also exploring the idea that you can find patterns in how language changes over time," he said. "Once you've identified the shapes of those patterns, you might be able to recognize something important as it develops, to predict the next big idea before it's gotten big." - Amira