Sometimes the finding is not the deliverable. Sometimes the deliverable is the thing people can look at, argue with, and act on.
This is the build side of the same practice. Where the language analysis ends in a decision, a commission ends in an artefact — a chart, a scrollable essay, a microsite that holds an argument.
What a commission looks like
A commission might be a single interactive chart, a scrollable data essay, or a standalone microsite. We handle it end to end:
- The analysis. Cleaning, modelling, and interrogating the data — computational text analysis, semantic networks, temporal change, personality and rhetoric, geographic and network structure.
- The narrative. Finding the argument the data can actually support, and the honest shape of the uncertainty around it.
- The build. Designing and engineering the final artefact, from a publication-ready figure to a fully interactive web piece.
How we work
We are candid early about what the data can and cannot show — before the design work begins, not after. We scope each commission to a clear deliverable and a clear question, and we build on tooling we maintain ourselves, so the methods behind a piece are transparent and reproducible.
What the tooling actually does
The libraries are not a portfolio flourish; they are what the work runs on, and each one exists because an analysis needed it.
- chronowords measures how a word's meaning shifts over time — memory-efficient embeddings aligned across periods, so freedom in 1800 and freedom in 2020 can be compared rather than merely counted.
- kenon builds co-occurrence networks from corpus-internal statistics alone: no neural models, no external training data, and therefore no borrowed assumptions about what words mean.
- keyflux does keyness properly — significance and effect size kept apart, rank-turbulence divergence between two corpora, and allotaxonograph plots.
- saphes measures readability and lexical diversity while exposing the parameters most implementations hardcode, and returns the counts behind every score.
- lexograph turns linear text into something you can look at: spirals, sentence walks, recurrence plots.
All are MIT-licensed and on the packages page. Nothing in a commission depends on a tool you cannot inspect.
What it looks like finished
The published work is the specification. The Nagel Index scores public speeches against private letters across seven American leaders and ships seven interactive dashboards alongside the essay. The Wrath and the Journey reads the Iliad and the Odyssey as corpora, maps both, and finds that 21.3% of the Odyssey is open water. Corruption Press Networks works through roughly 64,800 Hungarian news articles to build the co-occurrence network of the actors named in them.
Each states its method, shows its data, and can be checked. A commission is the same standard applied to your material.
Who it is for
Newsrooms, research institutions, foundations, and companies sitting on a dataset or a result that matters and is not yet legible to the people who need to act on it.
Need to know what your text data is telling you before deciding what to build? That is Actionable Insight from Language Data.
Begin with a conversation
Tell us what you have in mind — or send us a dataset and a question. A short call is the quickest way to tell whether we can help.
Book a 15-min call Send a message
Or write to hello@crowintelligence.org.