Fifteen billion printed words from 5.2 million books, or 4 percent of
all books published! Graphed and searchable! Thank you, Google! Thank
you, Harvard!

Why am I ecstatic? The project, reported in the journal Science yesterday and available
for the use of all, at once creates a new tool for cultural history
(dubbed “Culturomics”) and vastly facilitates one of the oldest (known
in German as Begriffsgeschichte, or the history of concepts).
Type in a word or phrase along with the dates you want, and you get a
graph showing the percentage of its appearances in books printed at a
given time. Click on the time period, and you get a Google catalog of
the actual appearances, with access to the texts themselves.

This allows us both to assess the cultural impact of major concepts and
figures over time, and  to trace and analyze with precision the
incidence and significance of lesser concepts and figures. The results
can confirm or disconfirm general ideas about cultural history as well
as suggesting new areas of inquiry. They also make it possible to
clarify with almost alarming speed our understanding of how specific
ideas and concepts came to the fore, and in what context. In the realm
of big religious categories, consider the following:

Christian:
It peaks in the early 16th century when the Reformation is in full
throttle; bounces around from the late 16th through the 17th during the
Wars of Religion; sinks to low ebb during the 18th-century
Enlightenment; makes a major recovery in the first half of the 19th
century (i.e. the Second Great Awakening); thence declines until the
latter part of 20th century (with a bump up for the “Eisenhower
Revival”); and now seems to be on the rise again. Pretty much what you’d
expect.

Protestant:
The big peak comes during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s.
Thereafter, it hits a high point in 1850, sinks steadily into the 1930s,
and has held pretty constant since. Again, to be expected.

Islam: Steady growth over the past century, but why does the biggest jump come in the 1950s? And why the decline since 9/11?

Atheism:
The recent bump of interest is no surprise, but the real interest in
the subject begins with the French Revolution, and persists through the
revival of the 19th century. Call it evidence of the War Between Science
and Religion.

Judaism:
There’s a steady rise from the beginning of the 19th through the end of
the 20th centuries, with fin-de-siecle bumps, perhaps relating to (1)
immigration and (2) Holocaust studies. But since 1996 there’s been a
notable decline. How come? Secularism shows a remarkable parallel: steady rise through the 20th century with a turnaround in 1996. Correlation or coincidence? (Update: Holocaust and Shoah both peak in 1999.)

This is, of course, the merest soupcon of how the database can be used. I’ll have more to say about it anon.