By Lawrence Haddad
This week is "fashion week" in London, where all the major designers get together to strut their stuff (think major development conference with more stylish clothes).
So what better time to preview the new Google Books Ngram Viewer or what Martin Ravallion, Head of Research at the World Bank, calls a "linguistic window on public awareness"?
A word is an I-gram, and so an N-gram is a phrase made up of I-grams. Michel et. al. 2010 (in the journal Science) have developed a body of N-grams based on 5.2 million digitised books from the period 1500-2008. The Viewer searches through the 500 billion words and counts the number of times the word or phrase appears and reports it, normalised by the the total number of words in the digitized set for that year.
So what better time to preview the new Google Books Ngram Viewer or what Martin Ravallion, Head of Research at the World Bank, calls a "linguistic window on public awareness"?
A word is an I-gram, and so an N-gram is a phrase made up of I-grams. Michel et. al. 2010 (in the journal Science) have developed a body of N-grams based on 5.2 million digitised books from the period 1500-2008. The Viewer searches through the 500 billion words and counts the number of times the word or phrase appears and reports it, normalised by the the total number of words in the digitized set for that year.
So, if you wanted to search for key words and phrases over the past 500 years, you can do it very easily (in several languages--my examples below are in English).
