Using the Google Books Ngram Corpus to Study Social Evolution

Abstract

This article briefly summarizes primary publications that use Google Books Ngram (GBN) to study societal change. GBN is the most extensive tagged diachronic corpus available. Trends in societal evolution can be studied using year-by-year word frequency statistics. The development of individualism, changes in emotions and happiness, social psychology, and some other topics are among those examined in this article as research areas that have attracted the most interest. This paper discusses the specific findings and the research methodology, particularly its limitations. There are some examples of how GBN can be used to test existing scientific theories. New, unexpected, and scientifically significant findings are possible with GBN that would not be possible with other approaches.