Using Google ngrams for theological research

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Ask Mr. Religion

Flatly Unflappable
At Google Ngram Viewer one can enter search terms and years to search for the occurrence of various words and see a nice graph. Below the graph appear links to various categories of years where the terms appear in Google's collection of digitized books.

For example:

Google Ngram Viewer

Might be a useful research tool for determining trending of various terms, topics, etc.

From what I can tell the searches go only as far back as 1500 AD. For the really serious researcher, you can download data sets and run your own complex queries.
See also the summary info about ngrams here: Google Ngram Viewer

AMR
 
I put in sin and self. The period between 1640 and 1720 the word self was at its highest peak and then declined rapidly. But around 1840 the use of sin started declining while the use of the word self began to increase once again.

Google Ngram Viewer
 
"God" peaks in the 1640s and 1710s:

God

Can someone suggest what was happening in the 1710s? My history is not strong.
 
Can someone suggest what was happening in the 1710s? My history is not strong.
Leibniz' Theodicy arrived on the scene. ;)

If you click on the link in your search for 1702-1719 you can get a sense for the volume of works that would cause this peak. The names of the authors shown are informative. Here is your search

for the peak year 1719:
https://www.google.com/search?q="God"&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1719,cd_max:1719&lr=lang_en


with just the years 1709-1710:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22God%22&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1709,cd_max:1710&lr=lang_en


 
Maybe I'm the slow one here, but what are these graphs used for?
See here.

Just another way of determining how a specific topic, word, etc., was being written about around a range of years using Google's acrhive of digitized content. One can see the graph showing the ebb and flow of the search terms through the years. Links below the graph show book content contributing to these ebb and flows. Peaks may point out something interesting or not.

For example, why the two peaks for this search:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Bible&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

;)
 
OK, fixed it.
You are a kind soul.

For you:
Google Ngram Viewer

And during the peak of 1794-1800 some of your ancestors were likely included here:
https://www.google.com/search?num=1...DOL0yQHfhYDIBQ&ved=0CDIQBSgA&biw=1920&bih=836

To get the more narrow searches I have shown in this and some posts above, I am basically hacking the Google links shown for the broader search. All I do for the broad links to content for specific years is manually change the terms in the search results that are obviously the year ranges. Just using the ngram main search fields will not let the user search for actual content on narrow year ranges, so like all things Google, I like to hack their search result links with some manual fiddling just to see what and what I cannot get away with.

I hesitated putting this example up...now get ready for the onslought of vanity related searches. Sigh. ;)

AMR
 
Thanks. I don't suppose I would ever use such a graph.
Perhaps not, then again, there are lots of uses. One I just posted above involves some ancestral research. Or maybe you are interested in how someone's first or last name has appeared throughout history in written works.
 
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