Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
The Harvard team got the ball rolling with some provocative diagrams of their own,
plotting the changing importance in the linguistic corpus of a variety of people, events,
and things. “ ' Galileo,' ' Darwin,' and ' Einstein ' may be well-known scientists, ” write
Michel and Aiden, “but 'Freud' is more deeply ingrained in our collective subconscious.”
“ In the battle of the sexes, ' women ' are gaining ground on the ' men.' ”
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Even
years
themselves could be tracked through the corpus, and these produced interesting
regularities.
Just as individuals forget the past, so do societies. To quantify this ef ect, we reasoned
that the frequency of 1-grams such as “1951” could be used to measure interest in the
events of the corresponding year, and we created plots for each year between 1875 and
1975. The plots had a characteristic shape. For example, “1951” was rarely discussed
until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its frequency soared in 1951, remained
high for 3 years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next 15
years. Finally, the plots enter a regime marked by slower forgetting: Collective
memory has both a short-term and a long-term component. But there have been
changes. The amplitude of the plots is rising every year: Precise dates are increasingly
common. There is also a greater focus on the present. For instance, “1880” declined to
half its peak value in 1912, a lag of 32 years. In contrast, “1973” declined to half its
peak by 1983, a lag of only 10 years. We are forgetting our past faster with each
passing year.
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Precisely what one makes of these word-frequency trends is, of course, open to ques-
tion. “Women” are not women, nor are “men” men, and there are good bureaucratic
reasons unrelated to “collective memory” why 1951 would appear in documents from
1950, but the researchers argue that within the terms of the linguistic corpus the data
speaks for itself.
The value of these diagrams immediately became a subject of scholarly debate. Some
humanities scholars were highly skeptical; others, such as Anthony Grafton and Geoffrey
Nunberg received them more favorably. Grafton invited Michel and Aiden to address
the American Historical Association in two special sessions in 2011 and 2012, the second
of which was substantially devoted to rebutting misconceptions including the notion
that culturomics sets out to replace historians with computer programmers.
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More significant than the Ngram Viewer was Google's decision to make its raw
data—if the term can be applied at all—available for download so that scholars could
run the numbers themselves without going through the ngram interface.
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This resource
