Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
been nothing odd about using the term “data” to refer to facts discerned through experi-
mentation, but here Colson uses “data” in the usual competing sense of principles or
axioms given on the basis of which methods may be devised and facts discovered.
This is what one learns from reading. But what about the data on “data”? Might a
quantitative approach be possible too? Might it be possible to study the corpus of printed
English topics in order to discover when “data” became a common term in English, how
it was naturalized from Latin, and when it achieved its various meanings? Fortunately,
today we are swimming in data for lexicographic research provided by both specialized
and general databases along a spectrum from stand-alone electronic books to massive
archiving and scanning endeavors such as Project Gutenberg and Google topics. Some
of these resources are set up in ways that generally mimic print formats. They may offer
various search features, hyperlinks, reformatting options, accessibility on multiple plat-
forms, and so forth, but, in essence, their purpose is to deliver a readable product similar
to that provided by pulp and ink. Others—still relatively few—foreground the aggre-
gate and statistical features of the textual corpora that they access, and in a few cases
Figure 1.2 Image: Relative frequency of “data” in Google topics, by year, 1700-2000, generated by Google
Ngram Viewer.
