Fun with Books Ngram Viewer

[Guest]

An utterly fascinating experiment from Google labs that I thought you mind find interesting. Check the occurrences of the word Coticule in the millions of books digitised by Google since 1750:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=coticule%2C+razor+hone&year_start=1750&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Scholars interested in topics such as philosophy, religion, politics, art and language have employed qualitative approaches such as literary and critical analysis with great success. As more of the world’s literature becomes available online, it’s increasingly possible to apply quantitative methods to complement that research. So today Will Brockman and I are happy to announce a new visualization tool called the Google Books Ngram Viewer, available on Google Labs. We’re also making the datasets backing the Ngram Viewer, produced by Matthew Gray and intern Yuan K. Shen, freely downloadable so that scholars will be able to create replicatable experiments in the style of traditional scientific discovery.

 

[Smythe]

when I search for the word "hone" and some results highlight "horse"...:huh:
OCR... don't you just love it?

 

[Bart]

(...) the millions of books digitised by Google since 1750:

And I thought Google was only launched in 1997.

On topic: I think books about "razor hone" ceased being written around the 1950's (as suggested by the diagram), while Coticules are not only considered sharpening stones, but also are a geological study object, heavily researched in the second half of the 20th century, because they occurrence of such rocks offers interesting insights in the geological history of our planet.
Let's look at the results for "spessartine" (the garnet crystals in Coticule rock) and "razor hone":
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?...start=1750&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Kind regards,
Bart.

 

[tat2Ralfy]

fascinating stuff
thank you for that Robin

Regards
Ralfson (Dr)