Culturomics has been well covered in the last few days, on the heels of a study published in the prestigious journal, Science. Using Google Ngram Viewer, powered by Google Books, the authors studied the rise, fall, and evolution of certain terms from 1800 – 2000 in a database of 5.2 million books. The danger of such powerful tools is that we begin to substitute quantitative data for qualitative insight, but a program like this can provide some useful, albeit limited, information.
You can actually go to the Culturomics website and plug in whatever words you’re interested in. I tried “short story” and “short stories,” from the years 1760 – 2000. Here’s the graph (click to enlarge):
As a term short story barely existed in the lexicon in the late 1700s, but in the 1800s began to buzz, around the time of Poe, Hawthorne, Gogol, and spiked at the end of the century (Chekhov). It wasn’t until the 1900s, however, that the form rose steadily in prominence (and one would assume, without too much error, in cultural influence). Nota bene: between 1940 and 1960 the usage of the term had largely leveled off, but then the Iowa Writers workshop stepped online canadian pharmacy into full swing, beginning the Era of the Creative Writing Program, which practically deifies the short story as a workshop-friendly model of fiction writing, and a second spike occurred, right at the beginning of the 60s.
I have no interpretation of the slight dip in the 90s, however. Perhaps this is a mere blip and is statistically insignificant.
Still, in light of the whole graph — that is, in light of the linguistic history of two and a half centuries — short story writers should stop bemoaning their insignificance. In historical terms, there’s never been a time when the short fictional form has been so relevant. I will concede that it’s possible that the linguistic usages are happening in ghettos — we are speaking about short stories to other short story authors in university towers — and so the increase in usage doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in cultural prestige. Also, it’s possible that different terms were being used to connote the same form, and so this graph only reflects the ascendancy of a term, rather than a form. But despite those misgivings, if you compare the usage to mid-18th century, it is quite a lovely spike.
