Google and a group of academics with fat grants have created an interesting new tool for cultural analysis.
We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.
So they created a tool to graph occurance of phrases in the database:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/info
Just for yucks, I pasted the phrases from the Preamble to the Constitution into the nGram viewer:
http://xrl.us/bmerti
'provide for the common defence' seems the most popular phrase.
Is this useful? To a culturonomist perhaps, but for me it's just an interesting little exercise. YMMV.
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