The analysis of culture and cultural behaviors can now be done in the Google Ngram Viewer which we
will now use to identify various waveforms. A waveform is simply
the shape of a curve over the whole time series. Many examples
will be provided below:
Google Ngram Viewer
Example words, pairs of words, combinations, phrases, etc, etc.
- lets being with the word pair science, religion from 1800 to 2008
- now enter science/religion to get a direct representation or the word ratio
- enter chide_VERB to see the decline of word over time
- enter grok to see a newly invented word take off
- Who was more popular for your parents/grandparents - the beatles or the rolling stones; go from 1960 to 2000 and enter The Beatles, Rolling Stones - do you see an event?
- enter in the word groovy
- who is more famous, Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe? - now add
Richard Nixon ...
- What about infrastructure - try railroad, radio, television
- Now something a bit more serious - Islam vs Christianity -
enter Christianity, Islam for the period 1800-2000 and then again
for the period of 2000 -- 2008
- Now try romanticism, wilderness, sustainabilty
- Now try liberity, equality
- try "end of the world" - apparently people were more pessimistic in the past
- try authority, individual - what might this tell you>
- try obliged for another instance of declining usage
- and finally put in American exceptionalism
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