Google Ngram Assignment

Instructions

Read https://goo.gl/f29ina for details and inspiration.

For EACH of the sections below, (a) create a graph making a comparison, (b) include the “code” used to create the graph, (b) describe what is shown by the graph, and, (c) double click on the words to see whether there is anything unexpected driving the effect, (d) if possible explain what factors are driving the differences between ngrams and their changes over time. Cultural changes, scientific discoveries, and historical events are all likely to drive interesting changes.

Use the language of dynamic systems in your descriptions, including state, attractor, collective variables.

Compare words

Compare several synonyms (words with nearly identical meanings, such as feline and cat).

Wildcard search

Google ngram allows you to search for * in place of a word. This allows us to look for a phrase. Try for example: favorite color is * This shows us that in English written text people’s favorite color is most often blue.

Inflection search

Pick a phrase and use the _INF on a noun and on a verb. Look to see which inflection is most frequent. Describe the effect. It may be the case that you can identify a reason for the effect, but just describing the effect in words is sufficient.

Search for a word using Part-of-Speech tags

Parts-of-speech tags can be used both to disambiguate homographic words that differ in part of speech, for example catch_NOUN, catch_VERB. It is also possible to see all parts of speech associated with a form: catch_*

Search for Parts of Speech (not a specific word)

Use *_NOUN, *_VERB, etc.