
10 Fascinating Charts From Google’s Ngram Viewer
10 April 2014, Jonathan Saipe
In last week’s webinar on Google’s hidden tools, I talked about the Google Books Ngram Viewer. A phenomenally interesting tool from Google that analyses the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations) or words and phrases found in over 5.2 million books digitised by Google. Data can be viewed from 1500 to 2008 making it a particularly insightful tool for marketers, researchers, sociologists, historians and many more professions.
To illustrate its power, I’ve put together 10 interactive charts which should whet the appetite. Don’t forget to click on the lines to highlight them!
1. Attitudes towards sex and marriage from the 1800’s
2. Our love affair with alcohol knows no bounds!
3. Battle of renaissance polymaths
4. I love my what?
5. Car accidents, car parks and car doors(!) on the rise
6. The rise and fall of opium and cocaine
7. 20th century struggles
8. Politics vs science vs religion
9. Coke vs Pepsi
10. The car – our favourite mode of transport
If you have any fascinating Ngram Viewer examples to share, we’d love to hear from you.
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David Atherton