The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Harvard Gazette, and Science have all reported on the news from Google. The company has made publicly available a database of all the words (in context) in the 5.2-million books it has digitized. A team of researchers, led by Erez Lieberman Aidem and Jean-Baptiste Michael, both Harvard fellows, helped assemble the data and are publishing a paper in Science that demonstrates how it can be used to illuminate cultural history.
One especially inviting part of the project is Google’s public release of its “Books Ngram Viewer,” which allows the user to plug in words and generate a graph of their frequency in print since 1500. Because the software allows you to search multiple terms at once, you can produce graphs of the contrasting frequency of related words. Since 1500, “rights” has been on the rise, while “honor” has waned.
“Fame” peaked in the first half of 18th century, “fun” in the second; “knowledge” has always outstripped “intelligence,” except during the final decade of the 16th century—Shakespeare’s most productive years.
The Harvard scholars who have helped to create this marvelous tool foresee a new field of “culturomics” that will infuse quantitative research opportunities with the humanities. It is too soon to assess that claim, but not too soon to discover a playground of words and ideas.
When I was writing Diversity: The Invention of a Concept in 2001 and 2002, it was heavy labor trying to find the early English uses of the word and what it meant. “Diversity” was originally a way of describing political unrest and civil strife. Though it gradually moved towards a blander sense of mere variety, it long retained a pejorative tone. But it was a minor word in the English vocabulary until the early 19th century, when it was picked up by biologists among others as a way to characterize the burgeoning knowledge of the natural world. Darwin eventually gave “diversity” its real heft as key to his theory of natural selection.
Those were hard-won observations in 2002. They are a lot easier today. For most of its history as a word in English, “diversity” described unwelcome realities. In 1669, one author referred to the “diversity of factions,” and in 1677, another wrote of “the misery arising to Men from Diversity of Religions.” But the same century presented other authors taking positive note of “the “diversity of gifts” (1687) and “diversity of delights” (1671). The word diversity in these latter cases, however, still signals to the authors something to be explained. How and why does God give us diverse gifts? Why we do delight in such different things?
Linguistically, we are a very long way from the slogans that festoon contemporary New York City, “Diversity is our strength.” According to Google, we began to “celebrate diversity” (in print anyway) only in 1993. “Diversity,” of course, has become a name for an unalloyed good in most of American higher education. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded that the term once marked out explicitly what is now only implicit. “Diversity” is still the realm of competing interests, group resentments, and difficult-to-resolve and perhaps unresolvable tensions. Celebrating it may help us ignore these aspects, but they really don’t go away just because we have reversed the emotional polarity of the word.
Before long, Google’s new tool may be as taken for granted as its extraordinary Google Earth is now. Dive in and discover it while it is fresh. The instant graphs are a delight, regardless of what comes from “culturomics.”
32 Responses to Ngram Diversity
chuckkle - December 20, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Wood:”“Diversity” is still the realm of competing interests, group resentments, and difficult-to-resolve and perhaps unresolvable tensions. ”
Ah yes, it was all so much easier when white male elites were in charge and the unwashed masses kept quiet and in place! We never had to acknowledge differentials in power, privilege, access, and wealth.
Chuck Kleinhans
11312609 - December 20, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Goodness, Mr. Kleinhans, where does this venom come from? On what basis do you accuse me of such outlandish views? As far as I know we have never met and manifestly you haven’t read my work beyond cherry-picking these Chronicle essays for things to take umbrage at. You seem awfully eager to launch scurrilous accusations at people with whom you disagree.
I know from experience with folks like you that to protest such smears usually prompts more of the same, and I pretty much expect that that is all you are capable of. But for the sake of other readers of this site, can you at least try to reign it in?
Peter Wood
lyndahar - December 21, 2010 at 10:54 am
Take a look at how well usage of “horse” and “happiness” parallels over the past 50 years. If there were more horses, perhaps there would be more happiness. (Yes, I know that correlation doesn’t mean causation.)
chuckkle - December 23, 2010 at 9:20 pm
In his CHE blog posts Peter Wood repeatedly attacks reformers who promote diversity. As a policy issue, reasonable people can reasonably differ. However with a rhetorical sleight of hand, he denies that there is any validity to the reform position. Therefore he doesn’t offer an alternative solution: no response is called for; there is no problem, except that some people keep complaining. Thus his answer is profoundly reactionary: we need to go back to the days when we didn’t hear from those folks.
I’m not aware of some “rule” that one can respond to a public statement only if one has read all of a writer’s previous work. Perhaps this works in Princeton, or in the gated community of National Association of Scholars headquarters.
But I don’t seem to be the only one who’s noticed Wood’s bias:
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Daniel L. Henry, Customer Review at Amazon.com of
Peter Wood, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now
As I turn the pages, however, a bilious sensation arises in my gut–the way I feel whenever it hits me that I’ve been duped. Peter Wood is accurate, I believe, in suggesting that starting in the 1950s, a counterculture reinvigorated a national tradition of protest speech, some of which became institutionalized as baby-boomers aged. The author wallows in shock talk and angry lyrics. He describes Al Gore’s “bloated face” and Hillary Clinton’s “New Anger theatrics.”
It started with Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Wood posits, then the “Howl” swept up war protesters, druggies, greenies, feminists, musicians, atheists, relativists, writers, New Age philosophers, entertainers, intellectuals, rappers, scientists, filmmakers, politicians, and communists. Oh yeah, and Joseph Campbell and Ben Cohen. All enemies of the Way It Used to Be.
Right. I am a white, Christian guy living in a rural Alaskan town. I hear that line of thinking a lot. I used to think it was just a product of basic paranoia and fear of change. Now there’s a book that proves it.
Missing is a scholarly eye to the role of traditional conservatives in the rhetoric of anger.
Omitted is any textual analysis of the Fox attack dogs, Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly; or the effect of the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, and the Christian Coalition used the anger borne of ebbing power to broadcast a fundraising rhetoric that proved so effective as to swing a vast voting demographic into an Evangelical army. Righteous anger fuels whatever campaign Wants Our Nation Back now. The evidence spills from the airwaves, but that evidence never makes these pages.
Draped in academic robes, A Bee in the Mouth turns out to be a tool of the very rhetoric it pretends to study. Author Peter Wood has done some thinking on the subject, and has written a book solemnly tracing the link between New Anger and New Age. But he overlooks the delicate dance of messages, that we choose ways of expressing anger based on the acts of others, and, that Right or Left, we all share the same hive.
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Chuck Kleinhans