johnslat
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 13859
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
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 Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2011 11:27 pm Post subject: Here's a Handy Little Tool: Google's Ngram Viewer |
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What's all this do?
When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.
Let's look at a sample graph:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info
This shows trends in three ngrams from 1950 to 2000: "nursery school" (a 2-gram or bigram), "kindergarten" (a 1-gram or unigram), and "child care" (another bigram). What the y-axis shows is this: of all the bigrams contained in our sample of books written in English and published in the United States, what percentage of them are "nursery school" or "child care"? Of all the unigrams, what percentage of them are "kindergarten"? Here, you can see that use of the phrase "child care" started to rise in the late 1960s, overtaking "nursery school" around 1970 and then "kindergarten" around 1973. It peaked shortly after 1990 and has been falling steadily since.
(Interestingly, the results are noticeably different when the corpus is switched to British English.)
Researchers at Harvard University's Cultural Observatory have put together some tips for using this data for scholarly research."
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-books-ngram-viewer.html
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
Regards,
John |
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