Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Tracking East Timor and Cambodia coverage in google books

It's been pointed out that two genocides, in East Timor and Cambodia, received quite different levels of attention in the Western media. The new google ngram tool allows that to be checked against coverage in the many English-language books scanned by google. The result? Much more coverage of the genocide in Cambodia; a little notice for East Timor after the invasion in 1975; climbing coverage in the 1990s from the Santa Cruz massacre (November 1991) to the independence referendum (August 1999); and a spike in interest early this decade, with interest falling off since the restoration of independence (May 2002).

Results in the smaller French-language search (no options yet for Indonesian, Portuguese or Tetun) are similar:

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