The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

by Robert D. Putnam

Using the website http://books.google.com/ngrams, it is possible to display the relative frequency of any word or group of words over long periods of time and thus to estimate trends in the cultural salience of words or concepts. We will frequently draw on Ngram evidence based on all books published in America from roughly 1880 (when our period of interest begins) to 2008 (the last year for which the archive is available).18 Scholars who have pioneered the use of Ngrams for historical studies of culture term the field “culturomics.”19 They argue that Ngrams provide a new and more rigorous way of exploring and quantifying cultural change, so that claims about culture become more than merely subjective.20