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Google Does Culturomics

Really cool what words you have all decided to search. :)

And as Pulvinar's search shows -- letter case matters. So it may pay when searching for love (at least in the Ngram Viewer :)) to type in:

love, Love, LOVE

It can affect the results, at least a tiny bit.

Wolfman said:
I like looking at this stuff and just trying to figure out "why".

<snip long interesting post>
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I was wondering about that too. BTW, I have to correct my OP (my bad). The Ngram viewer has access to 5.2 million books in total over 7 languages -- not 5.2 million in English alone.

That's still a lot of books but as per the above Google's Culturomics' link --

You'll be searching through over 5.2 million books: ~4% of all books ever published!
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Is that 4% a representive sample?

And how many of the books are in English and what percentage of books published in English does that represent, and is that a representative sample?

And does the Ngram viewer include words from books still under copyright -- or just books under the public domain and books from authors who have explicitly given Google permission to include their work in Google Books?

Those answers could shed some light on the results.

I tried googling (heh) for them, but I didn't get very far. Maybe on another day when I'm more awake I'll have better results.

But regardless of the answers, while books do reflect our culture -- it's obviously not the whole story esp. the less furthur back you go. Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, web sites (including youtube) obviously reveal a lot too -- and perhaps the more fleeting mediums reflect a truer picture of any given year's culture and trends than books.

It's still a fun tool though. :)




Wolfman said:
I did a search of a few online dictionaries, and can find no reference to any meaning of the word other than those tied directly to Adolph.
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You godwinned this thread!!! I was not expecting that to happen honestly. :D
 
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Wolfman said:
I did a search of a few online dictionaries, and can find no reference to any meaning of the word other than those tied directly to Adolph.
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I may have found one: "Amla'r cwrwf tra hitler"

Does anyone here read Welsh? It might be an English spelling variant of a Welsh word for straining (as through a strainer) or maybe tanning (as with an animal skin?).

But a lot of those early 19th-C. hits seem to be about another Austrian, Johann von Hiller.

And I found another problem with this tool -- mismatched metadata. Looking at the "hitler" results for 1812-1818, the first result looks like it has the wrong record for this particular book, making it seem like it's from the U.S. Congress in 1817.

Two "reviews" of this book have already pointed out the wrong date. I wonder if Google will notice this unusual use of their reviewing option.
 
"Sequencing": and "genomic" show a little blip from 1894-1905. At least one of those is a book listed as published in 1904, but looking at the text, I think that date probably off by 100 years.
Additional support that vitamin A modifies genomic expression comes from the recent demonstration of nuclear binding of retinol in liver (18, 23) and the observation that retinol regulates the concentration of poly(A) RNA (mRNA) in ...
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Interesting.

Daredelvis
 
Kahalachan said:
My first name gained popularity a lot around my birthday. Odd to think that there are tons of other people with the same mentality of my parents.
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Named after a famous personality of the day? Movie star? Rock and Roller? Politician? Fictional character?

I bet in 1940 there was a rise in "Dorothy" & "Rhett".
 
casebro said:
Named after a famous personality of the day? Movie star? Rock and Roller? Politician? Fictional character?

I bet in 1940 there was a rise in "Dorothy" & "Rhett".
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"Dorothy" peaked in the 1920's and has declined drastically ever since.

"Rhett" didn't enter the top thousand until the 1960's.

Maybe Americans weren't as media-obsessed in 1940 as their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are today.
 
I just ran a search on my first name, using 3 spelling variants.

I'm now convinced that, at least in the case of my name, the Google books are not a representative sample.

Without totally giving away my anonymity -- my first name is slightly unusual but became more popular during the second half of the 20th century. It is an extremely rare last name but is also the name of a cartoon character that was very popular for a time.

Google N-gram gave me absolutely nothing for the cartoon character. A man who was apparantly famous in the library field totally dominates the results for one of the spelling variants and that is misleading. Well, its misleading as far as the cultural trend of the use of my name is although obviously its not misleading as to how and where my name shows up in the Google Books' corpus.

I'm sure this is an issue for other names and phrases also.

It's still a cool toy though. :)
 
My first name has a massive spike around 1820-1825, then zigzags up and down at a much lower level for the rest of the time. I don't believe there was a sudden change in the popularity of the name, but I can't think of a reason that it would suddenly spike in 1820.

Even more odd, my surname has never been recorded in any book at all, which is odd, since there have been a fair few notable people with it. The common variant of it, which is comparably common in reality, seems much more common throughout history, even before Harry Potter.
 
Rat said:
My first name has a massive spike around 1820-1825, then zigzags up and down at a much lower level for the rest of the time. I don't believe there was a sudden change in the popularity of the name, but I can't think of a reason that it would suddenly spike in 1820.

Even more odd, my surname has never been recorded in any book at all, which is odd, since there have been a fair few notable people with it. The common variant of it, which is comparably common in reality, seems much more common throughout history, even before Harry Potter.
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That's why I think that Google Books, even though it is a very large collection, is probably not representative sample of what has actually been published over the centuries nor of what has been aired or published in other medias such as radio, tv, magazines, web sites, etc.

It's still fun though. :)
 
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Rat said:
"Atheist" does not show quite the pattern that one might expect.
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Perhaps bacause very early writings were in greater extent of religious nature.
Perhaps the graph for "atheist" should be corrected against the graph of "god"?
 
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