I'm afraid the scientific use is debatable. Much depends on projects scanning books and offering the scans to google. So the books searched might be very biased. And the bias might differ by period. After all it are just about 4 percent of all books ever published. (I would like to know this percentage by period) some more explanation on http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info
It is interesting to zoom in for example on "bobbin lace" from 1940-1980 and follow the link for 1959 respective 1960-1979. 1959 has some general textile and antiques book on top, where the latter period has many about bobbin lace on top. Where ever the links at the bottom of the graph shows a period (as opposed to just a single year) there is a chance you can narrow the plotted period. A combined graph for different lace terms http://tinyurl.com/35rvgyk I know spangles just from bobbin lace, but from this graph I guess it must have other uses too ;-) It would have been interesting to have different types of curves in the graph. For example just counting publications that mention bobbin/needle-lace at all, counting titles with containing the search term, counting books that mention both needle-lace and bobbin-lace as opposed to just one of them etc. Jo > (explanation is at http://tiny.cc/cwwy0 for anyone who missed > my previous post.) > > Nancy > Connecticut, USA - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com
