NgramScript

Basic python code to retrieve data behind trajectories plotted on the Google Books Ngram Viewer: books.google.com/ngrams. Just type exactly the same string you would have type on books.google.com/ngrams, and retrieve the data in tsv format. By default, data is printed on screen and saved to file in the current directory.

Note to savvy users:

1. you can directly pass queries as arguments to the python script, such as "python getNgrams.py awesome" or "getNgrams.exe great".
2. if you pass the '-quit' flag as an argument, the program will run once and quit without asking for more input, such as "python getNgrams.py awesome, sauce -quit".
3. Known caveat: quotation marks are removed from the input query.

Example usage:

Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin
burnt_VERB/(burnt_VERB+burned)
Pearl Harbor, Watergate -corpus=eng_2009 -nosave 
bells and whistles -startYear=1900 -endYear=2001 -smoothing=2
-quit

Flags:

-corpus=CORPUS [default: eng_2012]
   this will run the query in CORPUS. Possible values are  
   recapitulated below, and here http://books.google.com/ngrams/info.  
-startYear=YEAR [default: 1800]
   start the query in YEAR (integer). 
-endYear=YEAR [default: 2000]
   ends the query in YEAR (integer).
-smoothing=SMOOTHING [default: 3]
   smoothing parameter (integer). Minimum is 0. 
-nosave
   results will not be saved to file.
-csv
   results will be saved to a csv file (default is tsv).
-noprint
   results will not be printed on screen.
-help
   prints this screen.
-quit
   quits. 

Possible corpora:

eng_2012, eng_2009, eng_us_2012, eng_us_2009, eng_gb_2012, eng_gb_2009, 
chi_sim_2012, chi_sim_2009, fre_2012, fre_2009, ger_2012, ger_2009,
spa_2012, spa_2009, rus_2012, rus_2009, heb_2012, heb_2009, ita_2012,	
eng_fiction_2012, eng_fiction_2009, eng_1m_2009

PLEASE do respect the terms of service of the Google Books Ngram Viewer while using this code. This code is meant to help viewers retrieve data behind a few queries, not bang at Google's servers with thousands of queries. The complete dataset can be freely downloaded here: http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html.

This code is not a Google product and is not endorsed by Google in any way.

With this in mind... happy plotting!

Created by JB Michel for the Harvard Cultural Observatory
Oct 19 2012 www.culturomics.org, @culturomics, @jb_michel

Modified by M Shamim for the Rice Cultural Observatory
May 27, 2015 www.culturomics.org, @theaidenlab