Comments on: Language has a genome, and Google is mapping it. http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2010/12/17/language-has-a-genome-and-google-is-mapping-it/ Where media and technology meet Sat, 18 May 2013 00:13:49 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.2 By: CorpusProf http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2010/12/17/language-has-a-genome-and-google-is-mapping-it/comment-page-1/#comment-385261 CorpusProf Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:01:42 +0000 http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/?p=23664#comment-385261 Looking at the pretty charts in Culturomics and the new Google Books interface is nice. But of course there is much more to looking at cultural / language change than just using simple frequency charts of exact words and phrases. The NEH-funded, 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (freely available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha) allows for a much wider ranges of searches. Besides frequency lists like Google Books (with essentially the same results), simple 2-3 second searches can find changes in word meaning and usage (e.g. gay, care, web; or what we're saying about any topic over time), grammatical changes, and it can find *all words* that are more frequent in one period than another (rather than one by one, as with Google Books), as well as much more. More information at: http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/compare-culturomics.asp Looking at the pretty charts in Culturomics and the new Google Books interface is nice. But of course there is much more to looking at cultural / language change than just using simple frequency charts of exact words and phrases.

The NEH-funded, 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (freely available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha) allows for a much wider ranges of searches. Besides frequency lists like Google Books (with essentially the same results), simple 2-3 second searches can find changes in word meaning and usage (e.g. gay, care, web; or what we’re saying about any topic over time), grammatical changes, and it can find *all words* that are more frequent in one period than another (rather than one by one, as with Google Books), as well as much more.

More information at:
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/compare-cultu romics.asp

]]>