Google has provided some key resources for those looking to analyze data on the Web. Their Analytics, Trends, and Insights are just a few of the ways Google helps people get a firmer grasp on the virtual world. With Google’s most recent tool for analysis, however, they take a step in a different direction: toward the world of books.
We already knew Google had a giant library of digitized books at its fingertips, with over fifteen million currently present and accounted for. However, we learned from a post at the official Google blog that the search engine giant isn’t content with just stockpiling these billions of pages of words. Rather, it insists on analyzing them.
The idea behind the new service is to quantify the data found within the Google library, opening floodgates to new forms of research on literature throughout history. The tool lets users input a term or terms, as well as the desired limits for publication dates of books, and provides a graphical chart that shows how the terms trended in the selected time frame.
The data provided from Google has already been used for scholarly purposes, and was the basis of a study released on December 16th in Science Magazine. Google acknowledges that the tool is limited, but they state “we hope the Google Books Ngram Viewer will spark some new hypotheses ripe for in-depth investigation.” The company hopes that further studies may be able to use the information to enhance understanding of cultural diffusion, innovation, censorship, and more.
Researchers interested in using the Ngram data set will also be able to download it to their hard-drive, completely free of charge. Currently, however, only about a third of the Google library data has been added to the data set.
As a Google Labs feature, Ngram is in a phase considered pre-beta, but is still available for use by the public.
