![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
statistical waves
Dec. 17th, 2010 02:15 pmLike a lot of other people, I've been amusing myself today by trying out the new Google Books statistics viewer.
So far, my most interesting results have been proving my impression that hardly anybody - in the Anglo world, at least - had heard of fajitas or nachos before about 1980:
and watching the comparative rises and falls of notability of four British writers who hit the charts in the 1950s: Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Colin Wilson, and John Wain:
We should take all this with some caution, both because of "false drops" (the information science technical term for getting results that aren't what you're looking for, e.g. other people with the same name) and Google Books' absolute mania, as it seems, for misdating things. (Look up almost anything from before it could possibly have been heard of, e.g. "Gilbert and Sullivan" before 1870, and you'll find obviously misdated items. Some apparently misdated items turn out to be false drops, though; for instance, there appears to have been a Choctaw Indian, involved in a legal case around 1905, named C.S. Lewis.)
P.S. Who's the fat man?
So far, my most interesting results have been proving my impression that hardly anybody - in the Anglo world, at least - had heard of fajitas or nachos before about 1980:
and watching the comparative rises and falls of notability of four British writers who hit the charts in the 1950s: Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Colin Wilson, and John Wain:
We should take all this with some caution, both because of "false drops" (the information science technical term for getting results that aren't what you're looking for, e.g. other people with the same name) and Google Books' absolute mania, as it seems, for misdating things. (Look up almost anything from before it could possibly have been heard of, e.g. "Gilbert and Sullivan" before 1870, and you'll find obviously misdated items. Some apparently misdated items turn out to be false drops, though; for instance, there appears to have been a Choctaw Indian, involved in a legal case around 1905, named C.S. Lewis.)
P.S. Who's the fat man?
