By Daniel
(This article was originally published at Daniel, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Karl Marx is the most famous founding fathers of modern sociology with a popularity peak in 1975-6, but declining ever since.
Introduction
Google has a tool for tracking the frequency of words or phrases across its vast collection of scanned texts, the Google Books. The Google Ngram Viewer reports data and graphs the frequency of words encountered in one or across several corpus over time. For instance, the chart above campares the appearance in the English corpus of following bigrams names: “Karl Marx”, “Max Weber”, “Emile Durkheim”.
The y-axis shows of all the bigrams contained in the sample of books written in English, what percentage of them are “Karl Marx” or “Max Weber” or “Emile Durkheim”? From the chart above, we can conclude that Marx is the most famous sociologist among the others founding fathers, with a peak in popularity about 1975-6, but his influence has been declining ever since. These thinkers are considered the founding fathers of sociology because they set out to develop practical and scientifically sound methods of research to examine theories of the social world rooted in a specific historical and cultural context.
Using R with Google Ngram Viewer
There is a package to query the Google Ngram called ngramr written by Sean Carmody. With this package, one can retrieve data from Ngram pages in the form of data frame.
Getting Started
The first thing to do is to load the ggplot2 and ngramr packages. In case you don’t have them installed, an installation is required.
Write a Query and Do the Plots
The following is equivalent to the chart above for the three sociologists bigrams, except that I’m applying a smoothed line–or moving average of 5 years, so trends become more apparent. For instance, the data shown for 2000 is …read more
Source:: statsblogs.com