Sunday, June 3, 2012

Episode #035, 03.06.2012: Spotlight: Google Ngram

Today we’ll talk about Google Ngram. You can find it here.
As you might know, Google scanned a lot of books, which you can search and preview with Google books (books.google.com). With Google Ngram, you can see how many times (in percent) a word was used in books of a certain year. With this tool, you can see how widely a word was used in a certain time period. For example, type in the word “war”. In the graph you can see two spikes; they are unsurprisingly at the two world wars. You can also type in “war, peace” and compare the two words. Go ahead and try; type in words that come to your mind. Try “dog, cat” or “pencil, pen” or maybe also words from this podcast. You will find interesting results. For example, the word “Google” was more present in books around 1900 than in 2000!
Send your most amazing insights to: awordaweek@hotmail.de

This is the script to an episode.
You can listen to this episode at: awordaweek.podomatic.com
Please subscribe!
Intro and outro music in the podcast: The Jam by General Fuzz
Like the A Word A Week page on facebook!

No comments:

Post a Comment