Google Trends has a lot of flaws as a scholarly tool, granted. But today I wanted to check whether Marxist terminology--such as "proletariat" or "bourgeois"--has been on the rise.
I quickly noticed a cyclical drop in the usage of "proletariat" on the web. So I cross-checked that search term against the kind of term that students need to use during school, "covalent bond," and the kind of term that's only relevant during the summer, "corn harvest."
I was on a bit of a food kick, so I double-checked these results with "bourgeois," and against the seasonal terms "eggnog recipe" and "corn on the cob."
<sarcasm>Sure enough, it seems that the presence of corn or eggnog stifles the people's revolution</s>
If I had any kind of statistical software, I might be able to check the degree to which "proletariat" and "bourgeois" decouple or decohere from other cyclical search terms.
No comments:
Post a Comment