Add Google’s Ngram Viewer to Your List of Research Tools

Ngram Viewer is a search tool that students can use to check out the use of words and names in books published between 1800 and 2019. The Ngram Viewer shows users a graph highlighting the first look of a word or name in literature and the frequency with which that word or name appears in literature given that 1800. The Ngram Viewer will let you compare the use of several words or names in one chart.

The Ngram Viewer will let you compare using multiple words or names in one graph. The example that I provide in this video is to compare the usage of the terms “National Parks,” “National Forests,” and “National Forest Service.” By looking at the Ngram Viewer for those terms I can see that they start to appear more frequently around 1890, have a lull in the 1940s and 1950s, and after that appear more often once again in the 1960s..
Ngram Viewer is based upon books indexed in Google Books. That is why below every graph produced by Ngram Viewer you will discover a list of books about each of your search terms. Those books are organized by date..
A third element of Ngram Viewer to keep in mind is that it works with several languages consisting of English, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and Spanish..

Googles.
Ngram Viewer is a search tool that trainees can use to check out using words and names in books released between 1800 and 2019. The Ngram Viewer shows users a graph showing the first appearance of a word or name in literature and the frequency with which that word or name appears in literature because 1800. The chart is based on the books and periodicals that are indexed in Google Books.

Applications for Education.
As I discussed in the video above, the Ngram Viewer can supply a great way to start a research activity for students. Have them get in a few words then examine the graph to recognize peaks and valleys in the frequency of the words usage. Ask them to try to identify what would have triggered those words to be utilized more or less frequently at different durations in history.

By the way, the book that I discussed in the video is That Wild Country by Mark Kenyon..

You may also like...