Words found in books, 1850 through 2008.
Explanations? I think we need to recognize that for both “Israel” and “Palestine” there was a pre-modern, Biblical usage of the word in English; and then at some point the “modern”, political meaning got added in to that.
You can, obviously, also try this with any other words you please…
6 thoughts on “Kids, try this at home!”
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If this is real, then it means that in some place accessible to Google, all the books exist in searchable text format.
Whereas the most accessible to the public (apart from a very limited number of books available in text on the Internet) is Google’s own Google Books, in facsimile, therefore not searchable, and redacted in the crucial parts.
It means that the book market is heavily artificial. It means that the situation where we Africans, for example, cannot access the literature of our revolutions (Cabral, Neto, Nkruma, Sekou Toure, and many many others) on line is by conspiracy, by somebody’s monopolising policy of artificial scarcity.
Silly policy, because we would still want hard copy, and much more of it, if we could only explore and popularise all the texts on line.
The HSRC in South Africa published all its books in PDF on line simultaneously with (Print-on-Demand) hard-copy publishing for cash. This is the way to go, as well as the way to deal with the entire legacy.
FYI
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail.
She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.
http://theintelhub.com/2011/02/17/ray-mcgovern-bloodied-and-arrested-at-clinton-speech/
I have been told that one of my assumptions is not correct. The facsimiles like the ones on Google Books are searchable by an equivalent software to OCR. Well, fine, but it still looks like there is a parallel archive, an exhaustive archive, that we the public do not have access to; while what we do have access to in terms of books that we really need, is paltry.
the serious matter, Israeli will not been aggressive and breaking international laws without FULL support of the west specially US by VETO arm in UN security Consul.
Let read this whatever Mr. Obama said to ME regimes and citizens as his previous US presidents who promised that Palestinian State will be real before leaving the Whitehouse, all those words are Lies fly all around
Today we have this to read
US vetoes UN resolution condemning settlements as illegal
I am not sure that I understand Domza’s point but I agree that there is something unsatisfactory about the availablity of texts on line.
I use Google Books to read late eighteenth and early nineteenth century texts that are otherwise very difficult to access and impossible to buy.
The two things that irritate most are, firstly, the fact that books long out of copyright are ‘protected’ presumably so publishes can sell new editions.
And secondly the pay walls around Learned Journals of all kinds. Unless one is part of a University community (often a fate worse than death) it costs a fortune to read articles in learned journals, dollars per page.
It is time that scholars delighted in the advantage that the internet gives them to share their work and relish the world’s responses, rather than to allow their publications to be restricted to those with access to University libraries.
Of recent months I have noticed that some publications formerly available (I am talking now of works published before 1830) free, are now sold for downloading. So are facsimiles run off by booksellers on demand.
In short the pay walls are going up and a process of re-copyrighting seems to be taking place.
You understood, Bevin. You understood fine.
Let me give another example. I have with me Eduardo Mondlane’s “The Struggle for Mozambique” by the President of FRELIMO, published in 1969, the year of Mondlane’s assassination. I didn’t know we had this 42-year-old book in the house and I had been looking for it on the Internet, where I could not find it or any other writings of this major 20th-century revolutionary, Mondlane.
It is striking that in the chapter in the book called “Resistance – the Search for a National Movement”, Mondlane quotes all sorts of writings, including poetry and songs, from the preceding decades. In other words he clearly saw the contribution of literature to the national liberation struggle as major, even if the circulation was pitifully small.
Nowadays, for all the abundance of tweeting and other ephemeral material, the circulation of such literature would quite likely to be even less than it was in Mondlane’s time. In combination with the intellectual property laws, the Internet has instituted paywalls where there were no paywalls.
How does literature play its role today? With difficulty! As much as one has these instant means of dialogue, yet serious mass publications, including books, are slipping out of sight.