Data Diligence: More Thoughts on Google Books’ Ngrams
Matthew Hurst asks a number of interesting questions about the underlying data for Google Book’s Ngrams.
He illustrates that large amounts of data have the potential to be useful, but divorced from any context or at least limited in terms of the context that is known, it can be of limited utility.
Questions:
- Spend at least 4-6 hours exploring (ok, playing) with Google Books’ Ngrams.
- Develop 3 or 4 questions you would like to answer with this data source.
- What additional information or context would you need to answer your questions in #2?