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

Negative emotions

In the graph, I was able to see that while the words unhappy and melancholy are decreasing in usage, while the usage of the word depressed have been steadily increasing. It is true that in the modern age people started to utilize and accept depression as a disorder instead of ignoring and not expressing depression.

I also noticed that when replaced the word "depressed" to "depression", (as depressed is a more modern-frequently used word seen from the results above), I found the following:

Depression

From this graph, not only can we notice that after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 the usage of the word "depression" has greatly increased but also the usage of "unhappy" and "melancholy" shows a slight shift and increase. While checking the other shifts in the usage of word "depression", I also noticed that there was another little depression from 1970 and that this time around, the word "depressed" also showed a correlational shift upwards.

Wildcard search

Likes to drink...

When searched for "Likes to drink", it is noticeable that beer is the favorite drink, especially significant after the rapid increase of 1957. An info I have found related to this trend was that the current yeast strain was introduced in 1957, by the John Smith's Brewery; however, I do not believe this to be a significant cause as there were not many articles that described this feat as a starting point of the fame of beer.

Other drinks(milk, tea, and wine) can be seen as fluctuating, and I was able to see a little bit of correlation between the graph of tea and milk. The overall ups and downs are similar to each other.

Inflection search

Drinking beer

While drinking beer is the most frequently used phrase, it can be seen that the usage of "drinking beer" has drastically increased around the 1930s, which is also near the time when the stock market crashed. The second phrase, "drink beer", has been consistent in its usage even after the phrase "drinking beer" has risen above its usage.

However, overall, I believe that the usage of "drinking beer" has a correlation to some extent compared with the graph of "depression".

Search for a word using Part-of-Speech tags

Noun fly and verb fly

Upon observation, it can be seen that the verb fly has a sudden increase around 1935. This is the period where countries were moving towards the initiation of World War 2 and I believe that the correlation is between the production of aircrafts and preparation for war. Otherwise, flying has always been one of mankind's interests which could be an explanation to why the usage of the word "fly" decreases over time as flying becomes more available to everyone and less of an attention seeker. The noun fly is on one of its lowest rates, also possibly meaning that there is a less occurrence of flies as the modern society focuses more on sanitization and there are less flies in general.

Search for Parts of Speech (not a specific word)

*_ADV (Adverb)

It is very interesting that when looking at the adverb usage the word that is most likely to come before the adverb is "not". The most significant change is the "so"+adverb, which is probably a result of language and culture changing over time. On the other hand, "also" + adverb usage has steadily increased over time.