Thursday, January 20, 2011

Ngram Viewer

Google has a new tool called Ngram Viewer. It has led to a new field called “culturomics” - the study of culture using vast amounts of data. Here is how these buzzwords came about. For a jobless guy like me, it is fun to key in different words and see their trends. Some interesting ngrams were:
  1. India,China,Brazil - Why is India dipping in the last three decades?
  2. Some management jargon - Oh those MBAs!
  3. Schadenfreude
  4. I saw a list of 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. I looked at the graph of a couple of words that I did not know. (There were some words whose meanings I was not sure of but I probably would have guessed them if I had a few alternatives like in Reader's Digest. But I had no idea about these two words.)
  5. I saw a post about the best movie quotes of all time and looked at the trends of some of the movies (not the quotes because I am not sure how to handle the punctuations).
  6. Some poets
  7. Some fictional detectives
  8. Distinguishing real science from fads
  9. Apparently this is the Best Google n-gram yet.
  10. The Science Hall of Fame
But the graphs should be taken with a pinch of salt.

2 comments:

  1. Awesome. Thoroughly enjoyed this post. Also clicked through almost all the links, just in case you thought you are the only jobless guy around. Embarrassed to admit that I was not familiar with Ngram.

    One point here - the popularity of a word need not indicate anything more than the popularity of the word itself. "Schadenfreude" is a good example. My own theory is that the use of the word reached a "tipping point", after which the use of the word just exploded. Based on whatever I have read, feeling happy about the unhappiness of others seems to be an age-old emotion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Must say Google team has lots of people with lots of time!!
    Rgds,
    Leela

    ReplyDelete