Assignment: Use the Google Ngram tool to make an Ngram of a term (or several terms) related to your project. Write 2-3 paragraphs describing and analyzing the Ngram.
When thinking about what terms I should use for my Ngram, of course, my first thought was “Washington, DC” for obvious reasons, but I wasn’t sure what other terms to use. I continued with “George Washington” and “Thomas Jefferson” since they were the most relevant people in my research thus far. From there I tried a few different names that didn’t really work out like “Pierre L’enfant” and “Andrew Ellicott.” Since they aren’t really well known, they just looked like straight lines along the bottom (similar to how “Washington DC” looks in the screenshot). Also, the original time range I used was from the years 1800-2019 (the generic time range for Ngram), which showed that around 1930 and up, all of the terms had much higher percentages than what 1800-1900 shows. I decided to stick with 1800-1900 anyways though because that time frame is most relevant to my topic. Lastly, I wanted to tie together the actual founding of DC by adding terms that described the legal side of it like Article I Section 8 of the constitution. I felt putting “article I” and “section 8” together would have been too specific, so I started with just “section 8,” which had a higher percentage than I thought it would. Next, I added “section I” (which I eventually switched to “article 1” because I figured people would be more likely to write “1” instead of “I” (they had similar results overall though). Finally, another factor I changed to get these results is changing the corpus focus to “American English.” I did this because I wanted to yield results as specific to my research as possible, to see how often texts make connections between the terms as I have (which clearly isn’t that often).
Now, as far as what my Ngram shows, there’s a lot of variation between each term, but overall some terms follow a closer pattern than others. To start, “George Washington” and “Thomas Jefferson” have a very close correlation, and follow the same pattern of spikes and dips, only at different rates (like from 1835-1845 and 1870-1890). The terms “article 1” and “section 8” on the other hand, only follow a similar pattern right before 1830 and right after 1835. From then on, the two terms are neck and neck until “section 8” becomes far more common than “article 1” around 1850. All of this information shows is that the terms that are most similar to each other in topic follow the closest patterns. But, the most interesting part about the Ngram is that “washington DC” has the lowest percentage of all, even though all of the terms are relevant to the subject. I think this is because people are more likely to talk about any of the other terms more than their relation to the founding of Washington, DC. Overall, I think the most important thing that the Ngram shows is that people do not often talk about these terms in the same documents, even though they have everything to do with each other, and furthermore that people especially don’t talk about Washington, DC, even though it’s literally the capital city of this country.
Ok bye 😀
