Patterns of “Transgender” in Google News archives
I’ve been successful this past week in having a post every day, and even working ahead to have posts ready and in the pipeline a few days out. I’m really going to try and keep this up, because I love the amount of interaction and response that comes when I’m more consistent with my postings.
To that end, here’s a thought for this Saturday:
Google News archives have just over 70,000 results for a search of ‘transgender’:
They also let you see a graph of news results over the last 20 years:
And a timeline for all the results in their archives, since 1960:
An interesting pattern, no?
Frustratingly, the graphs above are massively not to scale. For example, the spike in the 1960s – seemingly rivaling the early 1990s in volume – really only had 182 articles, compared to almost 4,000 articles for the similarly-tall 1990s. (In fact, 1990-1995 is shorter than 1965-1970, even though it has more articles.) It’s a shame, really, because the graphs provide an inaccurate view of the data, but they still allow for some fun analysis.
The number of articles containing the word “transgender” has been increasing pretty steadily over the years, something that isn’t too surprising. It looks like a lot of the articles from the spike in the late 1960s is due to articles about the 60s – Stonewall, Pride anniversary celebrations discussing their roots, and so on – than articles from the 1960s, which also isn’t terribly surprising.
Anyone notice any other fun patterns, or interesting articles?
Themocracy
Is the data normalized in some way? Like with respect to the number of total articles that year it has found?
It just seems almost useless as a graph otherwise :p
I couldn’t tell. I would agree that the graphs are barely useful: they hint at more interesting patterns, but really don’t provide any conclusive info. I was too lazy to plug the search results data into a spreadsheet and do a real graph, but maybe I will one of these days.