Feminism, rape, pornography
On December 16th, Google unveiled a new app, called Books Ngram Viewer. This data visualization tool pools data from roughly 5.2 million books and displays the frequency of use since the 1800’s to 2008.
From Google’s presentation of Ngram Viewer:
Scholars interested in topics such as philosophy, religion, politics, art and language have employed qualitative approaches such as literary and critical analysis with great success. As more of the world’s literature becomes available online, it’s increasingly possible to apply quantitative methods to complement that research.[…]
Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books worldwide. The datasets we’re making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year.
These datasets were the basis of a research project led by Harvard University’s Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden published today in Science and coauthored by several Googlers. Their work provides several examples of how quantitative methods can provide insights into topics as diverse as the spread of innovations, the effects of youth and profession on fame, and trends in censorship.
The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years.
Just out of curiosity, I entered the words “feminism, rape and pornography” in the search field. I just intended to compare the frequency of their use. However, what I accidentally discovered was how all three terms peaked in use at the same time.
Now, I am not a sociologist so I cannot offer a causal analysis (did feminism raise consciousness so that these words were used contextually in similar circumstances? or did feminism grow as a response to an awareness of these issues?) but I have to wonder what exactly is the cause for a simultaneous peak in all three terms. Perhaps one of the political legacies of feminism is precisely that it placed different intersectionalities in a context and consequently created a recognition of how these issues are/ were inter related? I do not have answers, but I am certainly surprised by this finding.
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