I have way too many solid Presbyterian news items to get caught up on, but being the Presbygeek that I am, this was just too good to pass up…

Yesterday Google labs released the Google Books Ngram Viewer.  (OK, those of you who are not geeky, curious, or academically oriented may want to stop reading now.)

What Google has done is to provide an interface where you can count the number of times a word or phrase occurs in some subset of their digitized Google books.  For example, the use of the word “Presbyterian” in all English language books indexed with time:

As Google describes it:

Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books worldwide.
The datasets we’re making available today to further humanities research
are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words
from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and
Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts
of how often they occurred in each year.

and

The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets
over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years.
One of the advantages of having data online is that it lowers the
barrier to serendipity: you can stumble across something in these 500
billion words and be the first person ever to make that discovery.

So here are a few of my favorites from the first day of play…

You can plot multiple searches on a single graph, and the search is case sensitive, so here is Presbyterian and presbyterian for all English language sources in the database:

Unfortunately, I have not found a way yet to plot parallel usage in different languages in their interface.

One graph I really like is the usage of the phrase “Westminster Confession” in American English.  Note the spikes corresponding to the Adopting Act in 1729, an increase beginning around the time of the Plan of Union in 1801 spiking between 1810-1819, and the second spike right at the time of the Old School/New School split in 1837.  There is the longer time period in the late 1800’s following the reunion from that split and the revision of the Confession and then the discussion drops off.

But is this unique?  We can compare it with references to other, more ecumenical creeds, in American English.

It is interesting how closely the spikes in the Westminster are also seen in the Nicene Creed and how the Nicene and Athanasian in general form, ignoring the spikes, track the Westminster fairly closely.  And what about that poor Apostles’ Creed.  (or did I search on the wrong thing?)

One last one: What about different denominations.  Here is the chart for references to major Protestant denominations in American English:

Have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what to say about it other than the fact that I’m intrigued by the very close curves for the three denominations from about 1800 to 1915 or so.  I’ll leave present interpretation as an exercise for the reader, but will say that Google makes the datasets available so I’ll see about using the average of the three as a baseline and then looking at each in terms of deviations from the baseline.  Fun, fun, fun!  (I sometimes joke I’ve never met a dataset I didn’t like, but that’s not entirely true.   )

So, for those of you who also drill into this data set, let me know what interesting features or correlations you find out about Presbyterian polity and history.

Have fun!