Week Four: The Google Books Ngram Viewer

For historians and researchers, language-analysis tools such as the Google Books Ngram Viewer, provide a great deal of insight into the usage and trends of any word or small sentence throughout literature during a specific period of time.  The Google Ngram Viewer supports literature dating back as far as the 1800s in many languages including English, German, French, Russian, and Spanish. The Ngram Viewer project is made possible due to Google's partnership with numerous different libraries, which allows them to digitize historical texts that are otherwise inaccessible to the general public. The data is displayed using n-grams, which is a sequence of n items from any given amount of text or speech. The data often consists of syllables, letters, and words. To fully understand what the Google Ngram Viewer is and how it works, consider the following example:

Let’s say you’re researching World War II and you’re interested to see how many times the word “Germany” appears in texts between the years 1939 and 1945. Using the Google Ngram Viewer, you’re able to easily track its frequency.

Not only can you track the frequency of a word or phrase for a specific period of time, but you can track numerous at once, which allows for comparison and extrapolation. This example is obviously very simplistic for the purposes of explanation, but one can clearly see just how powerful this tool can be, especially in the fields of research and history.  At first glance, it may seem like the Google Ngram Viewer is simply just a new way to access and view data, but it’s actually much more than that. It introduces new ways to interpret data and encourages historians to ask additional questions based on their findings.

While the Google Ngram Viewer is already quite impressive, Google is constantly making improvements to the quality of data generated by removing faulty metadata. In addition to these ongoing improvements, Google has also introduced various mathematical operators allowing the user to add, subtract, multiply, and divide ngram counts.

The Google Ngram Viewer is valuable to scholars, linguists, and historians as it allows one to analyze the history of language through the numerous historical texts that Google has digitized over the past few years. This is another example of how technology is changing the way we gather research and look at history. Gathering this type of data a decade ago would have been impossible.