Slashdot Mirror
Analyzing Culture With Google Books
Harperdog writes with this excerpt from Miller-McCune:
"I would not call myself a Luddite — I use digital resources all the time, in my research and my teaching. I have hundreds of PDFs of books I have downloaded from a variety of online sources — Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gallica (the digital service of the French National Library), and yes, Google Books — that I use in my research. But when I read the Science article (abstract), I was immediately struck by what seems to me to be a fundamental flaw in its methodology: its reliance on Google Books for its sample. Google Books has focused on digitizing academic libraries. I would argue that books found in academic libraries are not necessarily representative of cultural trends across society. As any historian knows, every scholarly library is different and every library has its biases.'"
Isn't this article the same one that came out to accompany google's "ngrams" (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/) lab? I don't think these guys are trying to make generalizations about culture in general; they are only raising the possibility that, even with a small (4% of the total published) sample, interesting queries and surveys of human (although in this case Anglophone) culture can be made.
I have a sort of backburner project in which I break down the Icelandic vocabulary by morphology patterns and frequency of use, with the frequency of use arrived at by polling Google (the search engine). I figured, hey, with Google as a source, you'll get mostly people talking, plus news, plus ads, plus books, and in general a nice cross-section, right? Well, just ignoring some of my search methodology problems involving homonyms and declension forms (I have some ideas on how to counter those), I found that there were some serious biases by using Google as a search methodology which should have been obvious in retrospect. For example, "síða" (which can mean, among other things, webpage) was listed as one of the most common nouns. :)
Whatever corpus you choose, it's going to have its own biases.
Hey, guys, I'm just pleased as punch to report that it's a fleet of a hundred Vogon Battle Destroyers!
Google has digitized 5 million books from primarily academic libraries.
Microsoft began their digitization project in 2005 and abandon it in 2008, throwing users onto the tender mercies of book publishers and public libraries for content. Public libraries cannot afford to digitally scan books, even if the publishers would allow it.
Book publishers are the most vocal critics of Google's book scanning project, and to hear them wail you'd think Google was burning books, not scanning them. What the book publishers are wailing about is their perceived loss of profits because digitized books open the barn door, making mute the hope some have of renewing copyrights on material LONG resident in the public domain. In a word, greed.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I gave TFA a quick read, and you seem to be projecting your own issues on to the author. There's no talk of being "multicultural," no hand wringing over diversity.
It's a legitimate question that needs to be addressed in any research based on Google Books. I've heard the figure quoted in the article before, that Google Books represents 4% of all books ever published. That 4% is a large enough sample to "allow the kind of statistically significant analysis common to many sciences" doesn't mean the particular 4% represented on Good Books is such a sample.
I think your example is telling. Yes, Google Books includes Fanny Hill, so it's not all academic texts and scholarly volumes. But old pr0n is not the same as new pr0n, particularly is representing popular culture. You've got Fanny Hill, but not Penthouse Forum.
And given what we know about Google, are Google Books ngrams influenced by my Gmail account or previous searches on Google?
Google Books has focused on digitizing academic libraries. I would argue that books found in academic libraries are not necessarily representative of cultural trends across society.
This is just public posturing handwringing over being multicultural "enough". You wanna publicly wring your hands to get "diversity street cred", OK go wring your hands, but you don't need to actually engage the rest of us, you just need to strike the pose.
Speaking as someone who's been working in academic libraries for 18 years -- the original quote isn't handwringing over multiculturalism, it's an accurate description. Academic libraries purchase books that will be of use to academics. There are huge areas that they generally don't collect in. A contemporary academic library will purchase relatively few cookbooks, popular genre novels (romance, mystery, sci fi, etc.), YA books, self-help books, and so on, simply because they don't fit the library's mission. OTOH, an academic library is far more likely than a public library or a brick and mortar bookstore to have books written in foreign languages, books written by or about marginalized groups, and books written by minor or otherwise marginalized authors. An academic library's collection is likely to be more multicultural than that of any other book repository. But it won't have any Harlequins, any recent celebrity biographies, or Personal Finance for Dummies, so it's really hard to say that it represents the broad swath of society's reading practices.
It doesn't seem to be handwringing over cultural trends at all. Just seems to be saying that there's a very real chance of selection bias inherent to the data set.
Say you did an analysis of computer programming based on O'reilly's Safari service. It'd probably suggest to you that algorithms and system design was pretty much irrelevant to programming, since there's only a couple Knuth books which could be overlooked, but things like "Ruby on Rails," "Perl," and "iOS Programming in 21 Days," were incredibly important tomes, simply based on the relative volume of output related to the two subjects.
The content of those digitized books could easily skew the results of any quantitative analysis, when you are using source material that is curated & biased towards certain topics. The fact that you cite one "kinda porn" book as an example of the diversity simply highlights this: the inclusion of only a handful of "sexy" fare might lead people to conclude that, as a society, modern people are actually a very asexual bunch, much more inclined to think about academic topics, than sex. In short - a very mistaken conclusion, as anybody who's bothered to turn on a television in the past 20 years can attest.