Fun with Google NGram Viewer, Which Views N-Grams

[beamjockey]

I am fascinated by Google NGram Viewer, by the Science paper that accompanied its announcement, and by the 88-page supplemental material that accompanied the paper.

best practice, best practices
big picture
bionic, cyborg
bottom line
brainstorm, brainstorming
critical thinking
cybernetics, cybernetic, cyberspace
deliverables, deliverable
mission

Comments

[beamjockey]

Wouldn't this be more informative?
zero gee, zero g, null gravity, weightless, weightlessness, free fall

[mmcirvin]

By modern informal naming conventions for extrasolar planets, Earth is presumably Sol b. Unless for discovery one needs realization that it really is a planet, in which case it's probably Sol g.

[beamjockey]

Why "b?"

[mmcirvin]

The letters are assigned in order of discovery, starting with b. a is presumably the parent star, by analogy with the capital-letter designations for multiple stars, but nobody ever uses a.

[ffutures]

monorail, light railway, maglev, tram

[ffutures]

A REALLY odd one

antigravity, Dean drive, spindizzy, Bussard ramjet

Not at all the graph I expected to see!

[whl]

"Dean drive" can be a street, or a character action. Inertialess was interesting, though.

[mmcirvin]

That looks to me like it's just noisy because the terms are really quite uncommon in the corpus.

[mihai_lado]

I was surprised by the spike in 'nanotechnology' around 1900.

[beamjockey]

Everybody is surprised by this, the first time they play with the tool.

In some library catalogues, dates have been set to 1900 by default for some books. Google Books, which gets its metadata from the libraries (as well as other sources) has inherited this glitch.

Another thing: for a bound journal, sometimes the founding date of the journal is used, and it may not correspond to the date of the passage your search finds.

[le_trombone]

When it was first announced, I checked out "multiverse".

Then I said to myself, "Thought so."

[beamjockey]

?

[le_trombone]

The claim was that "multiverse" was coined by Michael Moorcock, a claim that I was always skeptical of.

Note that the graph starts to hover above 0.00000200% after 1920, and stays in that range for the next 75 years, after which it starts to zoom upwards.

[beamjockey]

Apparently William James was fond of the word, and lots of people cite him.