Charting the geosciences with google ngram viewer

Frequency of mention in books can be used to trace the evolution of a discipline, from the first recorded use of the word or phrase to its current standing, as measured by the number of books that include the phrase. Ngram Viewer, the tool developed by a team at Google Books (Michel et al., 2011) places a database (“corpus”) of >500 billion words at the disposal of its users (http://books.google.com/ngrams). Here I describe how this tool can be used to examine patterns suggested by qualitative ideas about the intellectual development of the geosciences. An example of the Ngram Viewer output is given in Figure 1.