David Bollier: The Decline of the Commons, 1760 to 2000, as Plotted by Google

[marmar]

The Decline of the Commons, 1760 to 2000, as Plotted by Google
Tuesday, January 25, 2011


Now that Google has digitized millions of books, the next logical step is to sift through those books for interesting patterns of thought. Enter Google NGram Viewer, now in beta, which can identify how many times a specific word or phrase appears in millions of books over certain time periods. The digitized books can be searched in a variety of languages – American English, British English, French, German, Hebrew Spanish Russian, Chinese.

This fascinating new tool enables one to identify certain crude trends about the ideas floating around in published books, which may be a proxy for what was on the minds of educated people. The raw data begs for us to make educated guesses about why certain words spike -- or disapear -- during certain time periods. (Thanks, Jim Boyce, for bringing this to my attention.)

So what happens when “commons” and “public goods” is put into Google’s magic database machine? You get the following chart:



What’s interesting is how the word “commons” has the most (relative) mentions around 1760 through 1780, and a fairly good number of mentions through the 1840s. But then the frequency trails off to the most minimal levels through the year 2000. (Data from 2000 to 2010 are not yet available, but will be coming soon.) I surmise that with the rise of industrialism in the 1840s --and therefore the many enclosures of the commons -- the visibility of the commons in people’s lives began to retreat. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://bollier.org/decline-commons-1760-2000-plotted-google

[Luminous Animal]

1. Wow!

[zazen]

2. but couldn't other factors be at play here?

I'm not disputing that there's a lot that sucks about our current income inequalities and seeming blindness to it.

But, what about terms like equality, abolition, civil rights, universal suffrage? Some movements for human rights may have changed their terminology.

Also, there are many more published books across "the professions" today--professions that either didn't exist then or weren't formalized/institutionalized through regular publishing such as that required by the academy. So, the proportion of books aimed at the general educated populace that discussed such issues today would cause those terms, even if they did appear, to be diluted.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. But...

how many of those references come from the British House of Commons and the enactment of bills for "the public good"? Let's not forget that the first half of the 19th century saw a good deal of civic reform in Britain with poor laws and laws to curtail child labour in mining and industry and the abolition of the slave trade and quite a bit else besides. (And I would suspect that "Commons" as in "the House of Commons" would be a much more frequent usage than "commons" as in "common land, public spaces" in that era.)

[wildflower]

4. I thought this was about Google planning the downfall of the commons

Based on the headline. It is fascinating, though.