Feb 17, 2014 — CANADA (SUN) — In 2013, Google released an interesting new software tool called the Ngram Viewer.
Offered as a free service under their Google Books program, the Ngram
Viewer allows quick keyword and phrase search of an enormous corpus, or
collection of digital book content. And most interestingly, it lets you
run comparison charts that show how two or more different terms or
phrases are mentioned in book content for the period 1800 A.D. to 2000.
Users
simply input one or several search terms, the comparative items
separate by commas, and the Ngram graph shows how often those phrases
occur in a given corpus of books over the selected years.
In
the example shown above, we see a great increase in the published
presence of the term "Krishna", as compared to "Vishnu" -- an upward
spike that coincides with Srila Prabhupada's arrival in the West. If we
alter the spelling to "Visnu", we get a similar but even wider
comparative spread.
There
are various corpora made available by Google Books that the Ngram
Viewer can be pointed at. For example, the "Google Million" collection
includes all the available books in English published between 1500 A.D.
to 2008 A.D. Corpora in various language groups are available, such as
English, British English and Chinese.
No
more than about 6,000 books were chosen from any one year, which means
that all of the scanned books from early years are present, and books
from later years are randomly sampled. The random samplings reflect the
subject distributions for the year (so there are more computer books in
2000 than 1980). This allows you to identify the actual trends in grown
or decrease of words and phrases. More technical details on how the
software works are available here.
In
the realm of words, names and phrases related to devotional topics,
there are many interesting trends that can be seen with the Ngram
Viewer. A few examples follow, showing trends in the publication of
texts, for example, by the BBT, by members of the Gaudiya Math, by
ISKCON gurus, etc. And most interesting is the great number of searches
that demonstrate the impact His Divine Grace had, and continues to have
on world, as the Holy Names are spread to every village through the
medium of published books.
http://www.harekrsna.com/sun/news/02-14/news5261.htm
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