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.'"

Comments

I've encountered similar problems with Icelandic

[Rei]

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.

Re:handwringing over multiculturalism

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

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.