So it was no suprise when  Culturomics  claimed yesterday, that they have started an "application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture" . They claim to analyze frequency of usages of words (printed in books) in 7 languages, covering 2 billion words and phrases, culled from 5.2 million books (~4% of all printed books). Impressive!.

The image blow is my attempt at discovering frequency of usage of some common words like war, peace, poverty through the years, from 1800 to 2002.

Notice the striking pattern in the trends of the two words "war" and "peace", rise of one seems to coincide with fall in the usage frequency of the other! Were authors just reflecting the prevailing social or cultural winds?

In my new found enthusiasm I played with few other words describing emotions, and found (no surpises here), that the word "love" overshadowed all other shades of emotions! The frequency of usage started falling from 1880 onwards, but it still stands heads and shoulder above all other flavors of emotions, both positive and negative.

Hats off to Google. They funded this project and developed a viewer - the Ngram Book viewer. Social scientists, Historians and linguists have found a new (but serious) toy to play with.