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C&RL News February 2012  116

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.
unc.edu

G a r y  P a t t i l l o

World languages
There are approximately 6,900 living languages in the world. Asia—with 2,322 
languages—accounts for 33.6 percent of all languages with at least one speaker 
for whom it is their first language. Europe accounts for 3.4 percent while the 
Americas account for 14.4 percent of living languages.
M. Paul Lewis, “Ethnologue Statistical Summaries,” SIL International Publications, 2009, www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs 
/distribution.asp?by=area (retrieved January 5, 2012).

Culturomics
Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, and 
others have studied a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4 percent of all 
books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus of millions of books enables them to 
investigate cultural trends quantitatively. Using the Ngram Viewer—now available 
freely to the public—they tracked trends in the evolution of grammar, collective 
memory, the adoption of technology, censorship, historical epidemiology, and 
other topics in the social sciences and the humanities.
Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, et al, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of 
Digitized Books,” Science 331 no. 6014, pp. 176-182 (January 14, 2011), www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.
full (retrieved January 11, 2012).
Jean-Baptiste, Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, “What we learned from 5 million books,” TEDxBoston 2011, September  
2011, www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html (retrieved January 9, 2012).

Google Correlate
Google Correlate is a tool from Google Trends that enables you to find Web 
queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a 
real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) 
or a query that you enter. Graphs are based on aggregated data from millions 
of Google searches over time. You can even search by drawing a graph curve 
to find query terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew. 
Remember: correlation does not imply causation.
Google Correlate, www.google.com/trends/correlate/ (retrieved January 11, 2012).

Graduate enrollment
Post baccalaureate enrollment in the United States has increased every year since 
1983, reaching 2.9 million students in 2009. In each year since 1988, women 
have made up more than half of post baccalaureate enrollment. In 2009, post 
baccalaureate enrollment was 59 percent female. Total fall enrollment in post bac-
calaureate programs is projected to increase through 2020 to 3.4 million students.
“Graduate and First-Professional Enrollment” (Indicator 9-2011), The Condition of Education 2011, NCES 2011033, May 
2011, nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_gre.asp (retrieved January 11, 2012).

Faculty salary
After increasing by 14 percent during the 1980s and by 5 percent during the 
1990s, average salaries for full-time faculty in the United States were 4 percent 
higher in 2009–10 than they were in 1999–2000, after adjusting for inflation. 
Combining salary with benefits, faculty received an average total compensation 
package in 2009–10 that was about 8 percent higher than the package they 
received in 1999–2000.
“Faculty Salary, Benefits, and Total Compensation” (Indicator 44-2011), The Condition of Education 2011, NCES 2011033. 
May 2011, nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_fas.asp (retrieved January 11, 2012).