Postby gwern » Fri Jul 15, 2011 8:54 am

After seeing Mike Darwin's attempt at interpreting cryonics history and PR with respect to Google N-gram's charts, http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/03/07/poisoning-the-well-measuring-the-cultural-penetration-of-cryonics-using-google-ngram-technology/ , I wonder what anime charts looked like. I tried to recall old series that were popular in English for comparison, and threw in Gundam and Sailor Moon as benchmarks. (Pokemon just squashed the chart flat, so I had to drop that.)http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Kimagure%2CEvangelion%2CEscaflowne%2CGundam%2CSailor+Moon%2CIkkoku%2CUrusei+Yatsura&year_start=1980&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0Noisy, yes, since it's dealing with a mostly (all?) English corpus and one that has anomalies others have pointed out.But some of the spikes seem to have reasonable explanations. The 2003/2004 Eva spike would be for EoE's English releases and 2007 for Rebuild; the 1994 Gundam spike might be for G Gundam (timing seems to be wrong for Gundam Wing - which seems to have no associated spike?!). Another anomaly is a noticeable bump in Urusei Yatsura in 2006. I have no suggestion for that. I don't know anything about Sailor Moon, so I can't venture an explanation for the 2000 spike; no doubt a movie or something was released then. (quanticle suggests it was due to Cartoon Network picking up Sailor Moon for Toonami in 1998 and airing S and SuperS in 2000 as well*.)Overall, interesting comparison. I bet people would not have expected Eva to be competitive with Sailor Moon or Gundam, which were so much more generally popular. Probably proof of academic interest in Eva - disproportionately covered or mentioned in published materials.* https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sailor_Moon_%28English_adaptations%29#Cartoon_Network