Friday, February 1, 2013 - 03:30 pm
Hollings Room of the TCL
Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/ Hollings Room of the TCL, part of the Center for Digital Humanities’ Future Knowledge series: Google Books is a promising tool for the study of language change, and how it may relate to historical, societal, and cultural shifts. However, the standard Google Books interface to the n-grams data only provides the most rudimentary of searches, and so much more could and should be done with the massive amount of data. In this presentation, I will discuss an alternative interface for the Google Books data (googlebooks.byu.edu), which provide a much wider range of searches -- incorporating collocates, searching by part of speech, and an integrated thesaurus -- all of which provide much more insight into cultural changes than are possible with the simple, standard Google Books interface.