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Posts tagged ‘pen’

Dec 31

Plot away on the Google Books Ngram Viewer

GoogleLabs recently released a tool that searches across millions of books to graph a word or phrase’s popularity over time. So when you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is based on a database of nearly 5.2 million digitized books (5,195,769 to be exact), totaling over 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and July 2009 (to be continuously updated as book scanning continues) in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian…

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Mar 23

Writing was More Organic in the Past!

Man learnt drawing before writing and the first instrument they used was probably a sharpened stone or flint. There was no TV then, and the internet was non-existent. So they spent time scratching pictures on cave walls depicting their daily life. The drawings became symbols which represented words and sentences, and since they were beginning to travel, they made clay tablets on which to depict their thoughts. The Greeks developed a writing stylus made of metal, bone or ivory (the UN ban on trade of ivory was yet to come into effect) to place marks on wax-coated tablets; the more clever ones had hinges so that they could be closed like a book to protect the scribe’s notes…

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