(This post is more in the nature of a genealogy diary entry or research note discussing a potential line of interesting research.)
Google in their attempt to “capture all information”, have been digitalising huge numbers of mainly out of copyright books (more than 5.2 million). Now they have introduced a tool to try and analyse this corpus of data: Google NGrams. This allows you to graph by date of publication the occurrence of a word (or even selection of words).
So for a genealogist, the logical thing to do is ego-surf – stick your own surname in the tool and see what comes out. (more…)
