For my first Google Ngram chart I used the terms “communism” and “fascism” and searched between the years 1800 and 2000.

The definitions of Communism and Fascism are as follows:

• Communism is a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money, and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order.
• Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. Historians cannot agree on a set definition but have noticed certain trends when it comes to fascist movements; the veneration of the state, a devotion to a strong leader, and an emphasis on ultranationalism and militarism.

It was not surprising to me that Communism started to rise on the chart beginning in the mid-1800s. In 1848, Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels published their famous pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. It provided a new definition for communism amidst the advancement of the Industrial Revolution. From there, Communism seems to steadily increase in publications. Fascism does not begin to rise on the chart until over 70 years later, in 1919. This was when Fascism was founded, in post-WWI Italy by nationalist syndicalists.
Again, I was not surprised to see Communism and Fascism both increase in publications around the early 1930s. Though World War II did not begin until 1939, related conflicts began earlier. Around the 1940s, Fascism was much more prevalent in publications, as the leaders of Germany and Italy operated under Fascist regimes. Communism, however, did not see a great decrease, as China, Cuba, and North Korea, among others, were all Communist.

When World War II ended in 1945, the use of Fascism declined, as these movements/regimes were mostly disbanded, and not many nations nowadays are openly Fascist. However, Fascism is still fairly popular in publications, which I can only assume are publications on history and the war. Though the use of Communism declined as the use of Fascism increased during World War II, it steadily increased afterward. This is because of the Cold War, which was a period of political and military tension following the war between the United States (and its allies) and the Communist Soviet Union. Communism reaches its peak on the chart between 1961 and 1963, probably because of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, both attempts by the United States the overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Both events were very important, so it makes sense that the use of Communism would increase during this time.

As Cold War tensions died down, so did the use of Communism. Though like Fascism it is still popular in publication, one can mostly assume it is a part of mostly history publications.

For my second Ngram chart, I decided to do something a little lighter than Communism and Fascism. I searched the characters “Marianne Dashwood,” “Elinor Dashwood,” and “Elizabeth Bennet.” Marianne and Elinor are characters for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility while Elizabeth Bennet is the main character of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

It seems that the Dashwood sisters do not enjoy the same popularity as Elizabeth. Though Sense and Sensibility was the first work Jane Austen ever published, Pride and Prejudice could be seen as one of her, if not her most, popular works. Therefore, Elizabeth Bennet increases in publication as the years go on, but does seem to decline quite suddenly at random intervals, though that may be just the only way the chart is able to show it. Though I tried “smoothing it out” using larger numbers, these seemingly random drops still occurred.

Google Ngrams is a helpful tool that can help locate trends in a wide array of digitized works. However, lack of context is a big drawback of the tool. Without context, some of the trends and information could be highly misinterpreted. Overall though, I find Google Ngrams to be a fun and easy tool to use.

I took two similar forms of data and made two separate charts, one involving the titles of my absolute favorite books, and one involving the names of my favorite literary ladies.

In my first chart, we see three novels, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and The Things They Carried. 

While Lolita and The Great Gatsby are classic novels, we can see clearly that The Things They Carried is a relatively new book as opposed to the other two which have clearly been around for much longer. Lolita is easily seen to be the oldest of the books. We see a large spike in the popularity of The Great Gatsby incredibly drastically, while Lolita’s popularity grew at a steady incline.

In my second chart, we see Jordan Baker of The Great Gatsby against Dolores Haze of Lolita. Both women, as seen in the graph, are characters that have reappeared heavily throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Jordan Bakers popularity trumps over Dolores Haze’s character, however, i have concluded that that occurs only because Dolores is notably referred to as Lolita or Lo rather than her full name Dolores, and in mentioning her, people often go for one of her recognizable nicknames rather than her given name.

These graphs show the popularity of certain words that we know today.  I looked up the three words that exemplify music; specifically genres of music which include:  rock, metal, and pop.  Turns out, that pop is the lowest in popularity while metal, and rock were the most popular.  In any case, between 1800-1900 it would make sense that metal and rock would be a lot more popular than pop because POP wasn’t really a genre of music between 1800-1900.  These graphs are really cool because being able to visually see the difference between certain words, make the idea of music genres so much more “real.”  I mean, as someone who loves music, I never really thought about the logistics, and statistics behind how popular a certain genre typically is.    Also, to me, my favorite genre of music is pop, so to see that it really was not at all popular was quite an interesting thing to see.   Between the years 1860-1900 pop made a small incline in popularity, while metal and rock both fluctuated dramatically between 1800-1900.  In 1820, rock had a downfall, but quickly had an incline in the year 1830.  Therefore for about 10 years, rock was not a popular genre of music.  Although, in the years 1820-1830, metal was not a very popular genre either.

The second group of words that I looked up were words that had to do with movie genres.   Within this graph, it is shown that over the years the genre horror has fluctuated up and down, but remained going in a downward direction from 1800-1900.  While horror was beginning to slowly go down, comedy, and drama also fluctuated but ended up going on an uphill slope closer to the 1900’s.  Between the years 1800-1830; there has been a major, major fluctuation between these genres.   Horror, and Drama both cross over one another in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s as well while drama and comedy intertwined at 1830.  At one point, drama and comedy both were at the same level of popularity and that was in the year closer to 1830.  

All of these datas I have looked at were all so fascinating.  When you think about these words, you never really understand the importance of them.  We say words everyday, but never actually realize or understand how much we really use them, or how much they are really used on an everyday basis.  Not even talking about these genres, but just in the sole purpose of them being used it is incredible to look up data to see what is popular, and the time period they were at their highest peak as well.   

Sammy Harris

I’ve had another chance to use the digital tool Google book Ngram viewer. I searched the words “Khaleel” and “war”. I graphed them independently and together to see which would be the best way to view the information. When I graphed the words together only the data of one of the words seemed to be prevalent on the chart while the other seemed to have no informative value at all. In this chart you can see how the word “war” out-values the word “khaleel” and I find this a little tragic because this means that not all words would be able to be compared together from this graph alone.

Here you can see the graph of both words:

When i searched up my name “Khaleel” I found it pretty weird that my name was mentioned more in books of the 19th century instead of the 20th or 21st. This could mean that my name isn’t used as much in books of today or that the popularity of my name has decreased since it’s introduction in the history of English literature.

I searched up the word war because that was one of the few things in history that has been apart of every generation. The value of the word spiked for two separate years and those were around the years of 1918 and 1942, which is almost identical to the same time frame of World War I and World War II. This shows that the atmosphere of literature at the time revolved around the current events of that time and the only event going on at that time was war.

Science fiction novels have made leaps and bounds over the past 65 years.  Just before 1950 was when they really started to take off, as nuclear weapons and the space race were gripping the imaginations of people all over the world.  Having just survived WWII, many were wondering what the future would hold for them.  With barely 20 years separating the first two wars, it was understandable for many to take for granted that a third one would not be far off, and with the next war, a nuclear holocaust.

If one adds that fear to the rivalry of the Cold War, and the race for the two sides of that conflict to be technologically superior to the other, the imaginations of the world turned towards science in a way that it never had before, and thus it was my hypothesis that Science Fiction as a genre would take off around the outset of the Cold War.

To test that, I created a graph of the worlds “science fiction” in Google Ngram.  Here is what I got.

As one can see, the words “science fiction” are almost non existent in literature prior to the mid 1940’s.  At this point, there is a steady rise in the frequency of those words until 1970, where is a sudden spike in frequency.  Since Neil Armstrong famously landed on the moon in 1969, it is very reasonable to assume that the moon landing had an impact on the popularity of science fiction.

One of the more popular science fiction novels of the time period The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, had a notable quote which became quite popular “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

The popular on the words “Free Lunch” soars after 1960, which is about the time when the novel was published.  This does not prove that the novel was responsible for the phrase, but it is interesting nonetheless.

To explore Google Ngrams, I looked at the most recent century for trends between the words “romance” and “sex.” The 20th century was full of paradigm-shifting developments such as the two World Wars, United States Prohibition, the invention of television and the internet, progressive waves of feminist and gay rights movements, and drastic developments in medicine and science. Baring all of this in mind, I was curious to look at how literature would reflect the frequency of romance versus the frequency of sex in this century. Based on the graphs below, as I suspected, the frequency of sex in literature spiked upward very quickly. I did not however suspect that romance would decline, I hoped it would remain somewhat steady over time (but that may just be the optimist in me).

One of the biggest social revolutions in the 20th century was the sexual revolution which first surfaced in the late 1910s and moved into the Roaring Twenties after World War I. This graph is a direct reflection of that shift in the time of hot jazz, speakeasies and flapper girls. We see a subtle drop in romance from 1910 to 1920, as sex steadily climbs to 1930, where it remains somewhat constant until 1960. In the Western World, the big sexual revolution took place from 1960-1980, where we see the biggest spike in the top curve. The last increase in the sex graph is in the late 1990s, with the advent of the internet and the shift in hyper-sexualized advertising on television. With free pornography on the internet and shows like Baywatch on broadcast television, this last rise in the sex graph is not a big surprise.

*All historical references from the following wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_revolution