Mike Davies’ TIME Magazine Corpus of American English is a search tool of the online archives of TIME Magazine from the 1920’s through the 2000’s. The tool is free and can be found here. Once you have played around on the site it will ask you to create a free username so that BYU can keep track of how the site is being used.
On the front page of the website, Davies claims, “You can see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency and see how words have changed meaning over time”. The website certainly meets the challenge of the mission statement, however, it can be a little complicated to navigate the site. The examples on the first page are good to play around with for beginners. One of the examples given is –gate, and how the use of it changed in the 1990s (e.g. Monicagate). Click on –gate and the top box will show words that use –gate. Scroll down to Monicagate (number 5 on the right), this will pop up the year and magazine articles which you can click for further context.
Another useful feature is the option to compare multiple features in the search. For example, you can compare two words like ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ and then you can further limit the search by adding the collocate ‘divorce,’ this can be even further restricted by choosing a time range in which to search. Once you pick an actual article, TIME Magazine Corpus directs you to the TIME Magazine website where you can email the document to yourself, print it, or share it via blog, twitter, facebook, etc.
You have to be familiar with the specific ways to search the site in order to really be able to use it. There are plenty of ways to find help on the site, take a look at the information that pops up when you click the question marks by the search boxes.
Even with this help, the site takes some getting used to and can be rather time consuming to use. It is certainly easier to use than to try and go through the texts yourself to see how words have changed over time.
As far as complexity, TIME Magazine Corpus is similar to Voyeur. It is also reminiscent of the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website, though I find Chronicling America much easier to use. The example page is great but perhaps some sort of short instructional video to go along with the example would be helpful. At least a tutorial would be great.
Though the site is limited to TIME Magazine, the amount of material is huge, ‘100 million words,’ and still growing as TIME keeps releasing publishing. A researcher could use this site to study almost anything, I conducted random searches in gender studies, film media, parts of speech, phrases, etc. and very rarely did the search conclude with less than three examples to pick from. In fact, the amount of information that normally pops up can be overwhelming.
Please play around on the site and let me know if you think that it is a useful site. Do you find it a bit difficult to navigate?