Here’s a fun toy for you to play with over the Christmas holidays – the Culturomics database, which allows you to type in a word, name or phrase and find out how often it’s been used in books in the past 200 years. The database contains 500 billion words from five million books, and is designed to allow a new way of mapping cultural change. For those of us of a less academic mind however (or those stuck in the snow, with nothing but a smartphone and and a wi-fi connection) it’s an intriguing way to pass the time.
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Intriguing! I typed in the word “Beatles” and was surprised to see an uptick around the turn of the last century. Thanks for sharing this!
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