Critiques of Google Books and Ngrams
At the start of class, we broke off into pairs to discuss what better ways there were to decrease Google Book’s bias, basing off of the fact that over 36% of the corpus has some sort of meta data error. We talked about having a geographical selection option to incorporate more non English texts and more eastern work to make for a complete corpus. We also talked about the ability to search with image, especially since art work also can speak to social ideas, especially political cartoons, children books, and so on. Something that we also discussed was how the bias in Google books could affect our results. Because we are looking at a predominatly western corpus, it could limit our findings. From here, a few of us thought about challenges our final project proposals could face. To conclude, the bias of Google books exists, but it is the researcher’s responsibility to somehow correct or handle that shortcoming, or incorporate it into their findings.