I think the idea is that what we are really trying to measure is something unobservable like the underlying nature of the character or the writers&#x27; tendencies to give characters certain ways of speaking. We can say that Stan uses a word at a rate certain rate corrected for that words base rate in the corpus, and compare this with the rate for another character. If that difference in rate is very small, it&#x27;s true that we still know for certain that the difference is absolutely true for this corpus, but it may not reflect any substantive difference between the characters.<p>If this is the view taken, then the population is all of the text that might have been generated by the data-generating process of the scripts -- things like the writers&#x27; mental models of the characters. In this view the actual scripts are just a sample from all of the scripts that could have been written while keeping the variable of interest (the characters&#x27; character) constant.