17 December 2010

Ngrams of Africa 1880-2008

Dave posted about this yesterday.  Ngrams is a beta tool from Google that lets you search a word or group of words in 15 million (12% of all published) books.  Read this really detailed account of the project (HT Chris Blattman).

I figured I would plug in all the current African countries to see what comes up.  1880 was picked as a starting point since it was roughly when the upwards ticks in mentions of countries began.  Sadly, I cannot do all of them on one graph. So, be aware that the %s are relative to those in each group.  The first graph has an upwards of .001% while the next one is .005%. (Click on the images to see them a bit bigger)

For fun, does anyone want to draw some conclusions?

Ngrams 1A


Ngrams 1

Ngrams 3

Ngrams 4

Ngrams 5

1 comments:

usalama said...

Most of the spikes appear to coincide with times when the country in question is of particular interest to Western media. (i.e. Congo in 60s, Uganda in 70s.) Interesting; not particularly surprising.