I began by searching for the word “right’ in the Google ngrams and bookworm program because it is the word I found first in Obama’s State of The Union Speech and it gave me the following results:
Both charts show the same increase of the use of the word “right” recently with Obama having used the word more than any other president and an upward slope in the Ngram. However Kennedy who is president when Martin Luther King gave his speech is pretty low on the list giving the impression that he was not talking about the rights of people during his presidency.
After seeing these results however I decided to test out if I obtained different results by searching “rights” and was surprised when my figures did change:
The data is completely different. Obama is in the final five and Kennedy is much higher on the list. The ngram shows a recent decline in the use of “rights”. This was important to demonstrate how a small alteration to a search can result in drastically different outputs and can effect the conclusions drawn from the data.
