Heresy: Google Books Less Useful Than Some Perceive
October 31, 2015
I love Google. Well, technically Google is now the Alphabet Google thing. You know the firm. Loon balloons, drones with solar cells, a lab working to kill death (poetic, right?).
I read a paper which some Alphabet Google thing lovers may perceive as heretical. In 14th century Spain going against the cultural flow could be hazardous to an author’s health. Here in Internetland, complaining about a Google service may not raise an eyebrow. Mention an academic Google service to a college sophomore, and the individual may panic and seek restoration with a 30 minute dip in the Facebook ocean.
I read “Is Google Books Leading Researchers Astray?” which is sort of summary of information captured in academic-speak in a PLOS article with the spider friendly title “Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution” by several collaborating scholars.
The point of the two write ups is to point out that using the text in Google Books for linguistic and other types of academic text analysis pursuits may not deliver the results one might hope for. The reason is that the text of the collection included Google Books does not reflect what’s popular.
I circled this comment about the editorial policy of Google Books:
For Shore [a university English professor], then, the real issues begin with Google’s little-understood archival methodology. Its approach, he noted, has been to simply “scan it all.” Because of this, “It’s often difficult to figure out what you’re reading, where it came from, who published it.”
Editorial policy and Google? Do these concepts go together like ham and eggs, peanut butter and jelly, and Lucy and Desi.
Net net: If you hanker for a way to study cultural evolution, Google Books may not be the Grand Central Station for your research.
Again I ask, “Does Google have an editorial policy for any of its products except certain advertisers and entries on its alleged black list of forbidden words and phrases?”
Stephen E Arnold, October 31, 2015
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