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.

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.

For my project on ngrams, I decided to focus on the 1880’s mystery of Jack the Ripper.

The first term I chose to search was, of course, “Jack the Ripper.” Strangely, though, the first activity shown on the graph is in 1883. I was a bit stumped as to why this was, because, by all accounts, the Ripper committed the series of murders in 1888. To try to dig deeper and figure out why there was an incongruence, I clicked the link on the bottom of the page for 1800-1889. I tried selecting a custom range of dates, but that proved unhelpful. It took me staring at the page awhile longer to realize that one of the books listed from 1880 was published by the American Kennel Club. Descriptions of that book and a few others featured buzzwords like “pedigree.”

I wonder how the owners of the show dog named Jack the Ripper felt when the little guy suddenly shared the moniker of a serial killer.

(Cute name, though… but I guess that depends on what kind of person you are.)

Overall, on its own, the alias saw a steady rise until a sharp increase occurred in 1888. No surprises there.

I found that words like “murder” or “crime” were far too broad; “Jack the Ripper” all but completely flat lined in comparison. Instead, I settled on “prostitute,” as they were primarily the victims. I attempted to use an inflection search of “prostitut_INF” in the hope of it including “prostitutes” and “prostitution,” but it came up with no results.

The height of the usage of the term “prostitute” was in 1804, followed by a decrease until it roughly leveled out in 1840. After having seen decreases beginning in 1861, the word’s appearance increased beginning in the mid 1880’s. It grew slowly but surely from then until 1900.

The rise could hardly rival the high point from 1804, but that it begins in the 1880’s hints at a possible argument that there is a correlation between the uses of the terms “Jack the Ripper” and “prostitute” in the texts of the time. While this could mean absolutely nothing, it could suggest an emphasis that was put on the identities of the victims.

Well I learned some darn cool things today! While using Google Ngram I thought to myself, what do I care about? I tried out a couple of words, typing in this and that just to get an idea of what words would work and what wouldn’t. (Guess what, Victorian people didn’t write about cookies like even a little bit, lame). I finally decided I wanted to know about pets but I figured typing just the name of three animals would be boring so I wrote instead “cat food, dog food, horse food”, because I like animals and I like food. I figured that which ever food for the specific animal was written about the most would prove to be the most popular animal of the specific times represented in the graph. So here we are, check it out:    Alright, so what can we interpret from this graph? First of all, in the early 1800’s cats and dogs did not seem that common. Ponies on the other hand? Ponies were all the rave up until about 1818 when people were like actually, these things are smelly and I don’t even know how to ride them (I’m assuming this is what they said). Interesting side not, I typed in after “dog as food, cat as food, horse as food” and at around the late 1820’s was when the first time “horse as food” was written in a Victorian book, coincidence? Probably not. They stopped feeding the horses and started feeding the horses to themselves! (once again assumption not fact) “[D]og as food” was also written a couple of times but “cat as food” didn’t even register, guess they didn’t like Chinese food. Anyway, It seems that overwhelmingly horses were the priority pet, a couple of times competing with dogs until the late 19th century when dogs went up up up, down down down and then finished way up again completely destroying horses. Doing a little research on the Google concluded that horses, dogs and cats were all rather common household pets (horses probably weren’t kept in houses but you know what I mean). Lap dogs were very common among older Victorian ladies, some sources saying they cherished them more than their children. Ponies were common for children to learn to ride. As for cats, although they were less common, they were owned in many Victorian homes. Of course, the lower class never really owned domesticated animals in their homes, middle class and upper class were generally the only ones to. 

For this week’s assignment, I chose to look at the three terms”daguerreotype”, “camera obscura” and “photography” in google’s Ngram viewer. All three terms ultimately relate to the create of photographic processes that we know today more informally as film photography, which preceded digital photography. Daguerreotype and camera obscura are two processes that entail reflecting light off of metal or other surfaces capable of bouncing light to capture images on another surface. These two terms were also the earliest forms of producing almost perfectly replica images in the way modern photography does. However, these two terms are not quite know outside of art history classes or photography majors yet the concept of photography is so integral to today’s society. Why is that? In an attempt to answer this question, I put these three terms into Ngram and the results are reflective of their status in the 19th century.

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