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 > > > > --- > You are currently subscribed to tips as: csta...@uwf.edu. > To unsubscribe click here: > http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13144.1572ed60024e708cf21c4c6f19e7d550&n=T&l=tips&o=7272 > or send a blank email to > leave-7272-13144.1572ed60024e708cf21c4c6f19e7d...@fsulist.frostburg.edu > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: j.cl...@uwinnipeg.ca. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13251.645f86b5cec4da0a56ffea7a891720c9&n=T&l=tips&o=7288 or send a blank email to leave-7288-13251.645f86b5cec4da0a56ffea7a89172...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7289 or send a blank email to leave-7289-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu