Activities - Words over Time (Beginner)

Suppose you want to know how the word love has been used throughout the years in different
cultures. It might be fair to assume that books are representative of what is important or
interesting to a culture, but how long would it take you to count how many times the word
love occurs in a book or even a large number of books?

Explore the link : https://books.google.com/ngrams/

Gambar 1. Grafik Ngram Kata Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, dan Frankenstein

If you handed a group of people today's newspaper and asked them to find the words that
occur most frequently, what process would you suggest they use to come up with an answer
in the shortest amount of time?
If you asked that same group of people to summarize today's news in a few sentences, what
guidelines would you suggest to help them find the most important information of the day?
What about for a year's worth of newspapers for a retrospective?
The algorithms used to scan through all of the words in the books is similar to the process
used to crawl the web and know which words are important and relevant to your query.
Algorithms such as these have made it possible to search through large amounts of
information.
If you wanted to keep exploring the possibilities, try these ideas:

1. Query multiple words in the ngram viewer. Try typing love, money into the ngram
search bar above and create hypothesis about whether or not the trends were a
coincidence, a reflection of a significant event or a shift in culture. Add in various
emotions like happy, sad to see if these trend along with your search term.
 2. Try the opposite approach. Think about a particular major event and see if you can
find the right search term that indicates an increase of its mention during a particular
time period.
3. Which medium would best represent your culture? Newspapers, books, music,
movies, text messages, YouTube videos, something else?

Algorithms, when implemented in technology, are able to carry out instructions far more
quickly than a human ever could. If this efficiency is coupled with a large amount of data,
then it might be possible to make discoveries that would normally require years of
painstaking research or many people working together. One of the original uses of the
term computer referred to a person, often working in a team over a long period of time, to
perform calculations that could be solved today by almost any pocket calculator. The n-gram
viewer is an example of an algorithm applied to a large data set that yields interesting, and
sometimes humorous, insights into our culture. As more people learn how to analyze data and
organize information, they will be able to apply it in new situations and expand the
understanding of the universe in ways never before imagined.

Answer question No. 1-3 in your own word!

Sources : https://learn.iste.org/