Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
5.00
3.75
2.50
1.25
0
Figure 1.3 Relative frequency of “ data ” in Google Books corpus, 1700 - 2000, generated manually.
Note:
Data
generated by repeated date-limited Google searches.
they do so even to the exclusion of the possibility of conventional reading, from begin-
ning to end.
Much has been written about Google Books, but a large part of this scholarly litera-
ture has focused on the ways in which Google interacts with and places stress upon
authors, publishers, libraries, and competing databases—stress that largely has to do
with the fate of topics in the electronic age.
15
Since the beginning of 2011, however,
new attention has been focused on the research potential of Google Books as a linguistic
corpus rather than as an electronic library. To facilitate research, Google has been
making its book corpus accessible in two new ways: the raw data, abstracted from
individual works, can be downloaded for analysis according to the interests of individual
researchers, or it can be searched through a simple online interface called the Google
Books Ngram Viewer. An “ngram” is a phrase consisting of a defined number of words
(n): the Ngram Viewer allows corpus searches on these phrases and returns statistical
