{"id":392,"date":"2010-12-21T15:04:31","date_gmt":"2010-12-21T15:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faulder.org.uk\/genealogy\/?p=392"},"modified":"2010-12-21T17:27:04","modified_gmt":"2010-12-21T17:27:04","slug":"research-note-google-ngrams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.faulder.org.uk\/genealogy\/?p=392","title":{"rendered":"Research Note: Google Ngrams"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This post is more in the nature of a genealogy diary entry or research note discussing a potential line of interesting research.)<\/p>\n

Google in their attempt to “capture all information”, have been digitalising huge numbers of mainly out of copyright books (more than 5.2 million).\u00a0 Now they have introduced a tool to try and analyse this corpus of data: Google NGrams<\/a>.\u00a0 This allows you to graph by date of publication the occurrence of a word (or even selection of words).<\/p>\n

So for a genealogist, the logical thing to do is ego-surf – stick your own surname in the tool and see what comes out.<\/p>\n

\"Google<\/a>

Google Ngram for 'Faulder'<\/p><\/div>\n

Going to the actual data<\/a>, you can search for the specific occurrences, to try and find an explanation for this graph.\u00a0 Unfortunately the vertical axis is the percentage of books published in that year that have been digitalised, rather than the number of books in the corpus.\u00a0 I suspect therefore that the peaks around 1800 may be misleadingly high due to the comparatively low number of books published around 1800 that have been digitalised.\u00a0 However the activities of the publisher Robert Faulder may mean that this is a genuine indication.<\/p>\n

Occurrences of the surname will not of course indicate mentions of members of our direct family but may give some clues for further research.<\/p>\n

Some of the occurrences in the period 1795-1811.<\/h2>\n