Google Ngram Viewer: Social Issues and Arts of the 1800s

This program is very interesting and useful because there are endless possibilities to what combinations you can submit and view. For this time period however, 1800-1900, puts a limit on what key terms we can use. Therefore, literature, social issues of that time, history, and other terms relevant to that time period is the best for accurate results. Screen Shot 2014-10-19 at 3.40.31 PM

As a social commentary, this graph shows the difference between the recorded women writers and housewives. Commonly known, women were not held in high regard for taking on professions that only men had at the time. Although having a creative mind for writing is not discriminate of male or female, during this time women writers were not commonly well respected. For that matter, there may have been many, many women writers, however they went unnoticed because of patriarchal limitations.

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Although both household names, I put in Michael Angelo and da Vinci in order to see the pattern between both very well known artists. It was interesting to see that from about 1830-1875, the two had been pretty even in popularity. However, Michael Angelo became vastly more relevant during the ten years from 1880-1890. This made me curious as to why there was a sudden spike in the artists popularity. Another reason why this program is useful, it causes questions to be asked that were not thought of before. Eventually, the two artists names seemed to have evened out as they were before.

For any comparative research this program would be very useful. When two topics are submitted that are pretty much relevant to each other is when the results are most accurate.