I still worry that though we know this is a lark, very few others do. And that’s what concerns me: that this becomes the ways in which “humanities” is visible to the public. (Though that gets me into my concerns about that New York Times series I’ve been grumbling about. So little humanities research gets put forward publicly in understandable and persuasive terms. So DH and n-grams stand in for why it’s all important, but it too often comes across as an interest in tools and games, and not comprehensive analysis.)

Of course it goes without saying that I wasn’t trying to do anything like science with my recent and most obvious Ngram joke, which you correctly describe as a lark. I’m more than passingly familiar with the problems of OCR and the corpus, especially with respect to the standing s.

And of course all of this was avidly played with and vetted when the Ngram tool & the Science paper first hit. Your idea of doing regressions on the corpus is compelling. But isn’t it difficult to do, given the way the corpus is built? It’s a very difficult egg to unscramble.

I’d add that there’s one other problem at play, and that’s the fact that even though we’re aware both of the usage of the medial-s and the problem of it being read as an f, most people using n-grams are not. I didn’t ask Matthew why he was tweeting that graph (and of course it’s v hard to tweet complex thoughts to accompany links). But if even he is spreading the fuck graph without commentary, what does that tell us about folks who aren’t so well-versed in old books and information history?

In other words, I’d add to your tweeted question, “what are you using this trend as an index for?” the question, “who are you”? Because that is going to make all the difference as well.