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Google Ngram Viewer Gives New Historical Perspective on Culture, Language

by Amar Toor on December 20, 2010 at 07:30 AM

Google Ngram Viewer
Google's latest search tool may not be its most widely celebrated, but it could end up having a far greater cultural impact than anything else the company has ever done. The new Google Books Ngram Viewer, which launched last week, collects more than 500 billion words, from over 5.2 million digital books available for free download. Users can search for a specific word or phrase, and the viewer will generate a graphic representation of how often the search item has been used over time. The database includes words used in books published between 1500 and 2008, in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.

The Ngram Viewer may seem tailor-made for academic research, but its developers are hopeful that the broader population will be drawn to it, as well. "The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books," said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Lieberman Aiden and post-doctorate fellow Jean-Baptiste Michel collaborated with Google on the project, and recently released a paper on how digital databases can alter our greater understanding of language and culture.

Using a modified version of Google's database, Lieberman Alden and Michel made fascinating observations on the evolution of cultural and technological trends, viewed through the lens of language. In the mid-20th century, for example, written references to celebrities faded away about twice as quickly as they did a century earlier -- an observation that led them to speculate that "[i]n the future everyone will be famous for 7.5 minutes." In the early 1800s, new inventions took an average of 66 years to be adopted by society at large, but only 27 years between 1880 and 1920.

And, of course, the database gave the researchers a unique perspective on the development of language, itself. With the help of Google, Lieberman Aiden and Michel discovered that the number of words in the English language has grown by 70-percent in the last 50 years. They were also able to closely track the transformation of specific words, and figure out when, for example, "learnt" turned into "learned."

Some academics, however, are concerned that this approach to culture (which the researchers dubbed "culturnomics") may be too reductive for serious humanist study. Humanities, after all, has always been a distinctly qualitative discipline, and many scholars pride themselves on their nuanced approach to history and language. "I could imagine lots of interesting uses, I just don't know enough about what they're trying to do statistically," former Columbia provost and historian Alan Brinkley said.

Harvard linguist Steven Pinker, however, thinks otherwise. Pinker collaborated on the paper, and told the New York Times that from a linguistic perspective, at least, Google's new tool could have far-reaching impacts. Thus far, Google has only covered roughly 11-percent of the entire corpus of published books -- or, equivalently, about two trillion words. The data used in Alden and Michel's paper only represents four-percent of the corpus. As Pinker said, "What we report in this paper is just the beginning."

Tags: culture, culturnomics, google, google books, google books ngram viewer, GoogleBooks, GoogleBooksNgramViewer, history, humanities, language, ngram viewer, NgramViewer, search, top, visualization, Web, words

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