Thursday, March 3, 2011

Fun with Google's Latest Visualization Tool: Ngram Viewer

Late last year Google released another free tool called 'Ngram Viewer'  http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/.  It's similar to Google Trends but we're no longer limited our search to the last decade or so.  Google may not have existed in 1800, but they're now able to show how many times a particular word or phrase was in text by year.  When your spare time hobby is to scan in every book every written you can do interesting stuff.

Want to know how many times the word 'fuel' was written between 1800 and 2008?  Try it out, you'll some interesting things.

Linked are some I found interesting:


The Future is No Longer Now, it has been replaced with the Past:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=future%2Cpast&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=0&smoothing=3 


But we like to write about the years:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=1800%2C+1850%2C+1900%2C+1950%2C+2000&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Political Parties:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=republicans%2Cdemocrats%2Cwhigs&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Some of the presidents:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Roosevelt%2CNixon%2CReagan%2CBush%2CCarter%2CKennedy%2CLincoln%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Academic Subjects (stolen from Ben Shneiderman):
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=chemistry%2Cphysics%2Cbiology&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Burger King IS King:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=McDonalds%2CHardees%2CTaco+Bell%2C+Burger+King&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

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