Google Labs has unveiled their Ngram Viewer for Google Books, which charts the usage of words and phrases in the Google Books corpus. This tool was released in association with an article published in Science about the findings of scholars who undertook to parse and study this mass of text.
As described in a piece by John Bohannon:
Mathematicians have used Google Books, the company’s ambitious—and controversial—project to digitally scan every page of every book ever published, to analyze the growth, change, and decline of published words over the centuries. The first explorations of the Google Books data are now on display in a study published online this week by Science. The researchers have revealed 500,000 English words missed by all dictionaries, tracked the rise and fall of ideologies and famous people, and, perhaps most provocatively, identified possible cases of political suppression unknown to historians.
Plus, it immediately became a hit, no doubt gobbling up thousands of hours of potential productivity and flushing it down the Google Ngram Viewer. Oh, and Twitter, so you could share your witty word comparison with hundreds of your closest friends.
But beyond that, the apparent insights from exploring this corpus in this way has incredible potential. Look, for example, at the history of the word “feminism,” or the phrase “civil rights”. Or better yet, together. That’s right, go play with it and see what you find. You know you want to.
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I think I’m going to jump off a cliff.
http://tinyurl.com/3yndb62
…..and the wasted buzz of the highway….buzzzz. Let’s all tweet at once now.