Fellow NUDHL-ers —

Happy summer! Hope you’re all finding a bit of time to decompress after a hectic academic year. I think I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but have just started really looking at Google’s Ngram Viewer. I recently happened upon this blog post by UC Berkeley’s Prof. Claude Fischer, and thought I’d throw it on here for those of you who don’t track the #NUDHL Twitter tag.

I’m really interested in some of the challenges confronting this kind of analysis, which Fischer mentions at the end of the post. For example: Which books are included for analysis, and how representative are they of broader cultural and social belief systems, linguistic patterns, etc.? How can this kind of tool account for the ways the meanings attached to particular words and phrases change over time? (I also wonder: how can this kind of analysis account for the fact that words and meanings are continually being discursively contested?)

Anyway, thought it was an interesting summary that some of you might like to read. Happy June!