Popular Dog Breeds in the United States

My poodle, Ruby June
My poodle, Ruby June

I’m a huge dog lover and knew most of the information that’s compiled here already from my years of watching televised dog shows and Animal Planet! Here’s my Google Fusion Table of 10 Popular Breeds in the US.

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Breed Cards
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Origin of Breed By Country
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The American Kennel Club classifies dog breeds in different sections based on their structure, activity level and innate instincts that help them perform duties or show off their skills.
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Many of these breeds exceed 10 years of age, on average.
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Network Visualization connecting AKC class and life span.

Spreadsheet link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17V25FvATvsrfZTU6H7tviirfHWA9PeORzhzxgP7k-Gs/edit?usp=sharing 

Google Fusion Table link: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1mTsizsqXrD6Mog6drSwz7dAqGL9FbwUZNXzd6G8X

Mass Media in The 19th Century

For my Google NGram, I decided to search these three words: journalism, newspaper and magazine. Journalism was the lowest of the three, magazine being in the middle and newspaper being at the top. Here is my Ngram:

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After doing a bit of research, I figured out some of the reasons why I found these results.

Newspapers:

-According to Branchcollective.org, an act passed in 1855 made print media less expensive.

“On 15 June 1855, the Stamp Act was passed, an act to amend the laws relating to the stamp duties on newspapers, and to provide for the transmission by post of printed periodical publications. The act abolished the stamp duty on newspapers, thus reducing the cost of such publications.” (http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_event=stamp-act,)

Obviously if something is cheaper, it’s going to become a lot more popular than it ever was before!

Another fact of why newspapers were more popular during this time had to do with the introduction of the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer in 1874. This enabled many people to be able to report on things and type up their own stories. This also helped with the daily production of papers because there was now a simpler and faster way to produce your works.

 

Magazines: In my research, I found that most magazines were mainly connected to the advancements that newspapers had undergone as well. The typewriter had a huge amount to do with the influx of magazines from its invention in 1874.

 

Journalism: In terms of this realm, it was based more off of the thinking of the era and the opinions that people had. Back in this era reporters did not have the values that reporters of today had. Therefore, the definition of journalism being the seeking of truth really hadn’t even been established yet during this time. Any newspaper that was published, was more of a propaganda and opinion pamphlet than actual unbiased news.

Google NGrams Assignment

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For this assignment, I choose to compare the different types of literature people could read during the 19th century. I used Google NGrams to search “books,” “newspapers,” and “magazines.” I decided on this topic because I was interested in how individuals during this century would get information from different types of media. I was surprised by my results, I thought that magazines and newspapers would have a higher chart, however they all are present throughout the century. After doing some research, it appears that books and novels were popular throughout this century, as they were becoming increasingly cheaper and were a staple of the middle and upper class household. Another important aspect of the rise in books was in increasing literacy rates that were available amongst members of all classes. Newspapers were also an important part of literacy media as they were cheap and provided important information in relatively quick time. Lastly, magazines were slowly making a rise at the end of the century as they provided specialized news for somewhat cheaper than novels, and they were published quicker.

As for settings, I played with the NGrams settings but had a lot of trouble finding a way to make my findings appear higher on the graph. I had to try a lot of different types of words to even get results that weren’t just bottoming out on the graph immediately. At first I attempted to look at different movements in literature, using the words “Romanic, Classical, and nature” but only nature would appear to be used on the graph. Overall I found this assignment difficult as the settings were hard to get to work in my favor. Just as well, choosing words to search was hard because there’s so many options and it is hard to narrow down interests, as well as find something that will appear throughout this time period.

Illnesses of the 19th Century

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I choose illnesses that existed in the 19th century because I thought it would make an interesting graph on how the word rises and falls throughout the time period. Each of the following diseases “Plague, Typhus, Yellow Fever” went through different levels of activities during the 1800’s. The chart clearly shows the rises and falls of the activities of these diseases from the 1800’s to the 1900’s. While researching these diseases I realized that typhus would be especially interesting on the graph because of its clear rise and fall during the time period. For the graph I set it up to only show it from the 1800’s to the 1900’s, I also inserted other diseases before I solidified choosing these three. The words I had used before this showed little rise and fall in the chart and sometimes it was because of the vagueness of the word or because it just wasn’t used very often compared to the other two words I had typed in. I thought it was really interesting that typhus and yellow fever switched at about 9 times, even though the activity for the diseases started around the same time period. Although I did have a graph for this project it wasn’t very easy for me, I found it difficult to work with different settings because it made my graph look off. Also I didn’t really know what words to use while doing this project, because I was unsure of what terms were more prevalent during that time period, but then I thought of my history classes and how disease were so relevant. So, that’s when I decided it would be an interesting topic of words to choose from because it would show a great deal of rises and falls. I didn’t think that there would be as much increase and decreases between the disease during the time period I thought it would start off high and just decline or start off low and increase rapidly.

Google Ngrams: An Etymological Study

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I don’t tell many people this, so consider yourselves lucky. I have my super-secret time machine whirring to life in the garage, so why don’t you join me on a trip? We can travel back into the 19th century to investigate three common words, how their usage began or changed during those hundred years, and potential reasons why this was the case.

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After we hide the Delorean, our work can begin. I chose musket (or musquet), anesthesia (or anaesthesia), and scientist, hoping that these three words would provide some interesting results from Google Ngrams. I set the years for 1800 to 1900, and settled on a smoothing of 5. The lower the smoothing number, the more jagged of a graph would be produced.

Musket is a word that refers to a type of infantry gun, and it had French origins from the 16th century. There were many spellings throughout the centuries, which is why I included the most popular alternate spelling. From 1800 to around the start of the Civil War, its usage almost doubled. In this same period of time, musquet was about 1/4 as popular as musket by 1800, and it had basically stopped being used by 1860. This coincides with a sharp decline in musket after 1860 as well. According to Oed.com, musket was reserved for obsolete weapons, while the more common rifle was adopted for contemporary firearms.

Next, I wanted to find a word whose usage began during the 19th century, and I settled upon anesthesia, which is generally spelled anaesthesia in Britain. Both versions were included in the search, and it is derived from Latin. Prior to 1840, there is practically no use of anaesthesia, yet thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary, we can see the use increased greatly for the remainder of the 19th century, peaking in the 1880s. The American version, anesthesia, slowly grew in usage towards 1900, but was still well below the British spelling. Of course, this word coincided with better medical technology, especially during the Civil War in the United States.

Finally, I chose another word, scientist, which I expected to rise in usage throughout the century. The slope of the graph grows slowly from the 1860s, possibly in response to Charles Darwin, who published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The Oxford Dictionary helps elucidate the origin of the word scientist, as W. Whewell stated in 1834:

…the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers… Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist…

More succinctly, in 1834 a gentleman compared art and science, and if someone who practices art is an artist, then a practitioner of science should be a scientist. This is how scientist became a word, and Ngrams shows its usage grew by about 10 times from 1870 to 1900.

Ok, its time to go…you get to choose the time machine destination this time, though.