Dear Luke,
Thanks for the heads up. It appeared also in ACM news this week.
Drat. five years ago I'd had a research assistant manually do the curve for
the term design from 1900 to 2000 and hadn't yet got around to publishing
it!
The new ability of Google to do an historical word count isn't anything like
useful as it seems in a research context unless one is looking at folk use
of terms. Any historical analysis of particular word use needs to
differentiate between the everyday folk meanings of a particular term and
the occurrences when the same term is used in a specialised
accurately-defined manner. This difference, and carelessness over it, is at
the root of much of the historical mess in the design theory and design
research.
Unless we are careful in how we use the new Google dictionary tools, and
avoiding using these forms of Google's tools when we are referring to
words defined accurately for research purposes, we are likely to make the
problems in the design research literature worse.
Best wishes,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Luke
Feast
Sent: Saturday, 18 December 2010 10:02 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Visualising how often words occur over time using Google Books
Dear colleagues,
The meaning of particular words and phrases is a common topic of
discussion on this list, this tool from google may be of interest to
the linguists and etymologists among us. The Google Books Ngram Viewer
allows you to graph how often phrases have occurred in the world's
books from 1400 through the present day.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-books-ngram-viewer.html
for instance art vs. design vs. science
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=art%2C+design%2C+science&year_sta
rt=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
best
Luke Feast
PhD Candidate
Faculty of Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne
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