Full-text American versions of the Times charts

This verges on unreflective datadumping: but because it's easy and I think people might find it interesting, I'm going to drop in some of my own charts for total word use in 30,000 books by the largest American publishers on the same terms for which the Times published Cohen's charts of title word counts. I've tossed in a couple extra words where it seems interesting—including some alternate word-forms that tell a story, using a perl word-stemming algorithm I set up the other day that works fairly well. My charts run from 1830 (there just aren't many American books from before, and even the data from the 30s is a little screwy) to 1922 (the date that digital history ends--thank you, Sonny Bono.) In some cases, (that 1874 peak for science), the American and British trends are surprisingly close. Sometimes, they aren't.

This is pretty close to Cohen's chart, and I don't have much to add. In looking at various words that end in -ism, I got some sense earlier of how individual religious discussions--probably largely in history—peak at substantially different times. But I don't quite have the expertise in American religious history to fully interpret that data, so I won't try to plug any of it in.

The decline here is not as pronounced in the British titles, and the word itself is much less common. If it's as true for British texts as American texts, it would suggest that decline was more about conventions for naming books than a retreat from universalism per se. There are a lot more movies with the word "return" in their title these days than there used to be, but that doesn't portend some resurgence of Vico.

The twin surprises here are the steady rise and how late it begins--in Cohen's title numbers, industry shoots up to about 1850 and then stays mostly level. I have no idea whether this is an artifact of usage in books, or if it actually reflects different patterns of industrialization between the two countries. Probably a little of both.

This is one of the words that just cries out for some analysis of comparative word usage at the beginning and the end of the frame: there's no way the context for 'science' is the same in 1830 and 1920, even if the rate of incidence is.

I haven't been using the same scale on these charts, but since scale was the point for evil, here are some together. In American full texts, unlike in Victorian titles, "evil" is a fairly common word, thought it does show a slight downward trend: "Industrial" and "science" aren't much more common at the end. And of course, God alone is the most high.