{"id":195,"date":"2011-02-11T15:41:08","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T20:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/2011\/02\/11\/google-ngram-viewer-vizualizing-the-history-of-the-written-word\/"},"modified":"2011-04-20T08:33:27","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T13:33:27","slug":"google-ngram-viewer-visualizing-the-history-of-the-written-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/2011\/02\/11\/google-ngram-viewer-visualizing-the-history-of-the-written-word\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Ngram Viewer: Visualizing the history of the written word"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google has been busily digitizing the world\u2019s <a title=\"Google Books\" href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/\">books<\/a> since 2004.\u00a0 As of December 2010, some 15 million books have been digitized.\u00a0 A couple of months ago, Google Labs announced a new tool called <a title=\"Ngram Viewer\" href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/\">Ngram Viewer<\/a> that allows the user to analyze and graph word usage over time from a 500-billion-word subset of those 15 million books.\u00a0 Google has divided the 500-billion-word subset into a number of \u201ccorpora,\u201d which allow you track usage of words and phrases in English, American English, British English, and a number of foreign languages including Spanish, French, and German.\u00a0 \u201cEnglish Fiction\u201d is a particularly intriguing corpus.\u00a0 The most accurate data are for English-language materials published between 1800 and 2000.<\/p>\n<p>Ngram Viewer makes it possible to track the early appearances of a word or phrase (like \u201claptop\u201d) in published books, but it\u2019s even more interesting to compare the ascending and descending usage of two or more words or phrases (like \u201claptop\u201d and \u201cmainframe\u201d) on the same graph.\u00a0 The graph below compares the usage of the words \u201cNazism,\u201d \u201cfascism,\u201d and \u201ccommunism\u201d in English-language works published between 1920 and 2008.\u00a0\u00a0 Not unexpectedly, usage of \u201cNazism\u201d and \u201cfascism\u201d peaks in the 1940s, while usage of \u201ccommunism\u201d reaches an apex around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).\u00a0 Beneath the graph is a series of year ranges corresponding to each search term entered into Ngram Viewer; clicking on a range runs a search in Google Books for publications within that range of years that include the search term(s) in question.\u00a0 Click on the image below to enlarge it.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Ngram Viewer\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/files\/2011\/02\/ngramviewer1.jpg\"><img src=\"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/files\/2011\/02\/ngramviewer1.jpg\" alt=\"Ngram Viewer\" \/><\/a>Ngram Viewer is fun and easy to use.\u00a0 Once you start experimenting with it, it\u2019s hard to stop!\u00a0 More detailed information about Ngram Viewer is available at <a title=\"Ngrams info\" href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/info\">http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/info<\/a>.\u00a0 To see an interesting collection of Ngrams submitted by users, go to <a title=\"Ngrams submitted by users\" href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.tumblr.com\/\">http:\/\/ngrams.tumblr.com\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google has been busily digitizing the world\u2019s books since 2004.\u00a0 As of December 2010, some 15 million books have been digitized.\u00a0 A couple of months ago, Google Labs announced a new tool called Ngram Viewer that allows the user to analyze and graph word usage over time from a 500-billion-word subset of those 15 million <a href='https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/2011\/02\/11\/google-ngram-viewer-visualizing-the-history-of-the-written-word\/'>[&#8230;]<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[348],"tags":[593,474],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions\/271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}