Hi

I agree with Claudia ... it is fun and informative.  One thing to watch
is capitalization, depending on what one is searching.

Searching terrorist, terrorism shows how these terms have markedly
increased in use in past few decades.

Searching Psychology, Biology, ... and some other sciences reveals
dominance of psychology in popular writing.

Also interesting to compare American and British English: e.g.,
searching sceptic, skeptic separately in the two databases.

I haven't checked systematically but I suspect it might have some of
the same biases as older frequency counts, such as a tendency to favor
abstract over concrete terms because of the nature of the subject
matter.

Take care
Jim

James M. Clark
Professor of Psychology
204-786-9757
204-774-4134 Fax
j.cl...@uwinnipeg.ca

>>> Claudia Stanny <csta...@uwf.edu> 17-Dec-10 9:59:57 AM >>>
This is fun.

Try dumping in some terms from psychology like "cognitive, cognition,
and
behaviorism"
or a technical term like "autobiographical memory"  (it will search
phrases
as well as single words).

Useful to set the beginning date at 1900 for this.
Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D.
Director
Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
Associate Professor
School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences
University of West Florida
11000 University Parkway
Pensacola, FL  32514 * 5751

Phone:   (850) 857-6355 or  473-7435

csta...@uwf.edu 

CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/ 
Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm 



On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Mike Palij <m...@nyu.edu> wrote:

> Google, which has been digitalizing the book collections of the
world,
> has created a database that allows one to examine the frequency with
> which words appear as well as their frequency overtime.  There is a
> NY Times article on this (which misidentifies Steven Pinker as a
> "linguist"; people in the humanities seem perplexed about whether
> such a database would be of any use to them); see:
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a26&pagewanted=all

>
> There is an article in Science by the people who worked on the
> database that can be viewed here:
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644 
>
> The Google database can be accessed here:
> http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ 
>
> And data from the database can be downloaded; instructions
> on how to do this can be found here:
> http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/datasets 
>
> -Mike Palij
> New York University
> m...@nyu.edu 
>
>
>
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