Friday, June 10, 2011

Transportation

Isn't any kind of analyst or scientist simply a fan of Google Trends, Google Correlate, and Google Ngram Viewer. You have to probably be an equally big fan of the brand mentioned as the first word in the names of those three wonderful online analysis tools above.
It is so easy: from a browser alone you can begin to think how to use the tools before even starting them (and no "learning the program" period, because you already know the language that they operate in). The search engine does it for you by a cool added algorithm that shows the timeline of your search.
Try it.
For instance, type in "transportation".
One of the search results is going to show you the timeline of references to the word.
It starts with the beginning of eighteenth century.
Next, you can choose time slices.
For instance, choose 1700-1750 to see all the available documents from the period.
You can then go through the time-slices (even by years) individually and weave a story that can from there be analyzed in context.
Later bring your own set of data into tools.
The only obstacle right now to infinite possibilities for deeper analysis and more sophisticated queries are the percentages of the publishers' (but not necessarily owners') claimed values of those archives, books, newspapers scanned and transcribed and made into a database.

3 comments:

Vuk said...

Good post, Slobo.

You're missing another great tool from Google - Refine. Check it out it's like a massive spreadsheet that makes it incredibly easy to scrub up messy data...

As per coding, I don't know about no-code being such a good thing. Anyway, you should check out Processing. It's a simple programming language that's very good for exploring data and making simple visualizations...

Slobodan said...

I'm trying out Google Refine and it's working like a charm.
More on results later (maybe).
And by knowing/not knowing language, I guess it came across not the way I'd have liked, didn't think about no code, but rather to say that it behaves like a search you'd do every day. Everyday language would have been better instead.

Slobodan said...

Thanks Vule!
Kudos to "Text Facet" functionality, and the emerging credo "freedom to make mistakes" to see the big picture (in Google Refine)

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