Two aspects that I gathered from the class discussion on October 4th are: 1) The NGram, and 2) Walking. The NGram stood out to me because we got to play around with it during class, and it was actually rather interesting. The NGram is a visual display of Google corpus, Google corpus being a list of information contained in anything that has been digitized in Google Books. We got to put in some words and phrases into the NGram and see how much information in the corpus was what we were searching. I searched for “World War II” and “United States of America.” I saw the “World War II” graph had an incline around 1941, which is when the war started. “United States of America” didn’t have a lot of hits, but was still interesting.
The final thing that caught my attention during class was the discussion about walking. As I mentioned in class, I think that walking isn’t necessarily a “fun” or “exciting” activity, so talking and reading about it wasn’t all that riveting. Once we mentioned the difference between people walking in Scranton and New York City, I became interested because I can relate to both situations.
Digital History at the University of Scranton