Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Frequency of words over time

The ngramr – an R package for Google Ngrams can create charts of the frequency with which words are used over time.  The package uses the Google Books diagnostics to scan Google Books to look for names.  The chart needs to be turned into data.

 "The Ngram Viewer will display an n-gram chart, but does not provide the underlying data for your own analysis. But all is not lost. The chart is produced using JavaScript and so the n-gram data is buried in the source of the web page in the code. It looks something like this:"

This can be used to see how economic words change over time and use this as a proxy for sentiment or thinking and then look for how this sentiment or general thinking affects things like the work of the central bank or the structural budge deficit, the PE ratio or more.

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