I learned, via the Jezebel grapevine, about a study published in PLoS One about using Google’s textual analysis tools to look at the predominant emotion descriptors in twentieth-century British and American literature. Here’s the abstract of the study by Acerbi, Lampos, Garnett, and Bentley:
We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more “emotional” than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.
I’ve seen articles about using Google to analyze literature before, and I’ve always had my doubts about them. I immediately start to ask questions about their methodology. Since the advent of using software to analyze large amounts of text, I’ve questioned it. It might be because I spent my undergraduate years learning to figure out literature the hard way. I’ll grant that looking at word frequencies can help, but software can’t help you glean meaning from the words in context.
Reading further in “The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books,” the authors do note that there has been an increase in words expressing fear and anger (though looking at their methodology, they might have skewed that way). Given what’s happened in the twentieth century, I can easily believe this. I’ve seen how well horror, mysteries, and conspiracy thrillers have done in the bestseller lists. But then, Frankenstein, Dracula, and Poe were products of the nineteenth century, and romance novels are still doing well.
Acerbi et al. also point out that they’re seeing fewer descriptions of emotion in the texts they fed through Google’s Big Data, which I find very interesting. It’s tempting to use the data to psychoanalyze writers and readers over the last hundred years. It makes sense that literature would reflect our collective psychology. But then, speaking for myself, I’m also drawn to books that let me see things outside of my own experiences. I’m just one reader, but I daresay that at least some other readers are the same.
I don’t mean to pick apart Acerbi et al.’s work, but I have a lot of questions and quibbles. The biggest one I have is that they don’t seem to ask about changing tastes. Sure, literature reflects desires and interests, but the style of literature that was popular in the nineteenth century is a lot different than what’s popular now–just as what was popular in the eighteenth century was different from what was popular in the nineteenth. Authors have to keep evolving and experimenting, otherwise people stop reading them. I suspect that Acerbi et al. are on to something, but I think it’s just part of a much bigger picture.