While waiting for the text of the FCC’s Open Internet Order to show up on their web site, I decided it was the right time to take a quick at look Google’s fascinating Ngram viewer. So what has Google wrought this time?
From their vast digitized collection of 15 million books, they’ve analyzed 5 million and produced a frequency dataset of all phrases or ngrams up to five words in length. Even better: the frequency of a particular ngram occurrence includes a time dimension.
With the new Google Ngram Viewer, you have a cute visualization app that shows the rise and fall of phrases or expressions over the years. In the context of the FCC’s “momentous meeting” this morning, it’s worthwhile to really see how the Internet has become what we mean by communications.
I decided to compare the usage of the words “Internet” vs “telecommunications”.
Obviously no surprises, but it wasn’t all that long ago telecommunications—which for me brings up memories of legacy TDM gear and forg0tten file transfer protocols—completely ruled our language. Now, not as much.
Related articles
- Google Books Ngram Viewer (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
- Google Ngram Viewer app
