Quantified Culture and Arguable Truths

2011-12-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

Ever wonderedhow an idea or a word evolved with time? For example, when did football start gainingpopularity or how did the President become more important than the King (or hashe)? Google Ngram is a wonderful tool tospy on the history and find insightful patterns.

It’s not the first time that Google has done something that’sextremely cool. But Google Ngram certainly gets my vote for the most curiosity-inspiringthing they have ever done. To put it briefly, Google Ngram “lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million booksfrom across centuries.“ (researchers very close to this project claims that this digitized book-bank of Google is 12% of all the books ever published).

Now what does it mean to a random internet surfers like you and me? lets illustrate with (quite!) a few graphs generated by Ngram. These graphs plot number of occurrences of certain words in 5 million books along timeline [Fore more details: official Google research blog]

Many of our searches can land you with merely confirmatory stuffs (can also be considered as a validation that this tool works!).

wife (Blue) vs husband (Red). No! it's not just because I snapped it during daytime.

A few others might not be that obvious, but are not ground breaking either.

love (Blue), sex (red), beauty (Green). "Bed" before beauty, but love above all (although, steadily declining)

You may want to consider a few as timely reminders (or bragging rights).

rich (Light Blue) vs wise (Red) vs handsome (Green) vs charming (Yellow) vs respected (Dark Blue). Where the glory lies

Some of them can be inspiring.


can (Blue) vs cannot (Red). Isn't it refreshing to know that historically we have been a optimistic species (or is it too optimistic a conclusion)?

But a few are rather disheartening.

happy(Happy) vs working (Red). Sad: They seem to be inversely proportional! Sadder: World is getting increasingly more concerned about "working" than about "happy"

Some of these follow fairly "intuitive"patterns:

Rajnikanth (Blue) vs ....... (Sorry! couldn't find anyone who wanted to be pitted against You Know Who.)

Many others might be more thought-provoking


rape (Blue) vs feminism (Red). Does it indicate a chicken and egg problem? I mean, does feminism intensifies as number of rape increases? Or is it the other way around, may be a masculist reaction? Note: 1. There is no time gap between the two, 2. Sadly, rape seems to be leading the contest, forever

But all the fun aside, do you think that this tool can give anysignificant, real and explainable results? Well, in a few cases it certainly can.

war(Blue) vs world (Red). No wonder that the "war" crosses "world" only twice, during the two world wars

King (Blue) vs Queen (Red) vs Minister (Green) vs President (Yellow). The President line shows some interesting patterns when mapped with US President's (the most important and mentioned president) timeline. Does it also suggest that unlike shorter publications, books pick significant contributions more than controversies? How else can FD Roosevelt (in top 3 of Times person of the century) trump the most controversial ones like Johnson (blamed for escalating Vietnam war), Nixon (Watergate, and the only US president to resign) and Clinton (Remember Miss Lewinsky?). Continuous decline of King, also suggests downfall of empires, including the British Empire

This tool also lets us search in specific languages, which may unveil more intriguing insights. For example, we expect President to be more popular than the Queen in US. But when that is the case in UK as well, we know that power equation has changed!

President (Blue) vs Queen (Red), in American English

President (Blue) vs Queen (Red), in British English

It appears almost intuitive that this tool should reflect the history of pandemics very closely. Disasters are generally well covered in literature. Isn't it? So, lets take a quick view of what Ngram discloses about the diseases.

Cholera (blue). An Interesting thing to note is the time lag. For first 4 pandemics, there is a considerable time lag between the time of pandemic and the time when it start "trending". Obviously, 2nd pandemic garnered most reaction as it hurt the power zone of UK, mainland Europe and North America. On the first look it appears to be counter-intuitive that the 5th pandemic got so much attention; "it didn't reach the power houses"! But, this was the time when a certain Robert Koch discovered cholera virus, which caused a lot of academic attention (another proof of how talkative academics can be?!). There after, the intensity of the pandemics and the public interest started decreasing. The fact that it could never stage a comeback to UK/ US/ mainland Europe, didn't help either.

Extensive Ngram research identified three most dreadful diseases of the last two centuries. Note: small pox was mostly referred as pox in the early 18th century (it can also be validated by a Ngram search)


pox (blue) vs Cholera (green) vs AIDS (red). It is interesting to note that the reaction time has been drastically reduced in recent times. AIDS started trending almost as soon as it was found, even in pre-internet era!

The accuracy of this data can certainly be questioned. A few book snapshots provided by google surely look out of place. For example:

Note the first 2 book listings. Mention of Apple Computers, Microsoft and their troubled relationship doesn't surely date back to 1896!

But these are rather exceptions. In short, this is another superb effort from Google! No wonder, they don't have to shed much mullah in marketing campaigns!

Curious Cases

Quantified Culture and Arguable Truths