Google Ngram of "Old Growth Forest"

[edfrank]

Steve,

An important article on Mixed mesophytic forest was published by Lucy Braun in 1935:

The Undifferentiated Deciduous Forest Climax and the Association-Segregate
E. Lucy Braun
Ecology
Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jul., 1935), pp. 514-519
(article consists of 6 pages)
Published by: Ecological Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1930083

               

                       

                                       

               

Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America: Volumes 27-30
No cover image
       
Dr. Braun led a field trip for the Ecological Society of America to oook at mixed mesophytic forests in 1947, this surely can't be a coincidence:

Ecological Society of America, JSTOR (Organization) - 1946 - Snippet view
CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS FIELD TRIP - MIXED MESOPHYTIC FOREST Leader — Dr. E. Lucy Braun A summer field meeting of the Ecological Society of America will be held in southeastern Kentucky, June 9 to 13, 1947. This location was selected so ...

At this time there also is a plethora of article about mixed mesophytic forests in northeastern Ohio around that time period that certainly contributed to the peak.  Google hit on a total of 41 results from the period Jan 1945 to Dec 1948.

.

[edfrank]

NTS,

At the encouragement of Dr. Neil Pederson and Steve Galehouse, I started to use the Google Books Ngram Viewer http://books.google.com/ngrams/  to further explore the term "old growth forest" in the Google Books collections.  Both made some worthwhile suggestions on possible sources for some of the observed peaks.  I also wanted to explore the process to better understand what exactly the charts were showing.

               

                       

                                               

googlengram.JPG (49.86 KiB) Viewed 466 times

               

               

Toward this end I potted the occurrences of the phrase "old growth forest" along with various synonyms and what I thought might be related subjects across time.   These are presented in the attached pdf.  I also went further and decided to use the Ngram viewer and Google Book Search to try to find the origin of the term old growth forest itself.  That also is included in the attached document. It was originally meant to be a short blurb for the BBS and magazine, but I am afraid it has grown significantly in size fro those original aspirations to about 24 pages - mostly graphs.  

It is an interesting project that explores the usage of a particular term as our culture has changed over time, and also looks at the inception and acceptance of new terminology into the lexicon.  There are many more themes that could be explored, if nothing else it is fun to do.  I know Steve Galehouse has some more graphs to share here.  I would encourage others to explore the terminology we use with the Ngram viewer

Edward Frank

               

                       

GoogleNgram_OldGrowth.pdf

                                               

(2.25 MiB) Downloaded 50 times

               

               

[Neil]

pretty amazing and thorough work, Ed!

finding that reference back into the 1700s is tres cool.

neil

[edfrank]

Neil,

I am glad at least you and Steve read the document.

Ed

[dbhguru]

Ed,

    I have read the 2.2MB document and I salute you and the work you did in applying this interesting technique. I actually planned to respond in depth, and will, but am presently buried in projects. The Forest Summit (Oct 13-14) is fast approaching, followed by the ENTS Rendezvous on Oct 15th. More in these events later today.

Bob

[edfrank]

Google Researcher Finds Most-Used English Words, Letters
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/google-researcher-finds-most-used-english-words-letters.php
Carl Franzen January 7, 2013, 6:52 PM 5016

“Etaoin srhldcu” may read like nonsense to most English speakers upon first blush, but as it turns out, the combination is quite significant. It represents, in order, the most used letters in the English language, according to a new survey of 743 billion words conducted by Google’s head of research Peter Norvig.

               

                       

                                       

               

Using the Google Books Ngram viewer (which shows word popularity over time), Norvig created a new dataset of some 97,565 unique words, collectively repeated 743.8 billion times, which he noted on his blog is 37 million more occurrences than the 20,000-word sample that Mayzner assembled. Norvig’s sample also included over 3 trillion individual letters.

Edward Frank