Google Books’ ngram tool lets you search and compare mentions of various terms in books that they’ve digitized. I ran some city names through it to see how the relative level of mentions of these places has changed over time. These aren’t perfect. Some city names are too generic to really isolate, like Columbus (could refer to Christopher) or Charlotte (a common name). Others I assumed do typically refer to the major city of that name, but have other uses as well (Paris, St. Louis). Also, these are English language city name searches, and I’m not sure how much international literature Google has digitized anyway.
With that in mind, here are some charts. First, a look at three major global cities:
It’s interesting that London and Paris have been pretty consistent over time. New York has soared as it grew from a colonial town to premier global capital.
Here are some prominent Asian cities. Note that Tokyo was named Edo until 1868. (I left off Beijing because it was transliterated as Peking until recently).
Here are some other major, established US cities.
Despite the rise of the West Coast, LA and SF haven’t gotten as much love. Chicago’s rise is especially notable.
Here are some Sunbelt cities compared.
And some Midwest cities.
There’s a big peak around 1920. You see it also in Chicago above (too many mentions to easily fit on this chart), though in Chicago’s case it didn’t decline.
Heres a zoom in on Cincinnati vs. Indianapolis.
We see here mirrored that Cincinnati was once a very major city, and a different class than Indy really, but how that gap has essentially closed over the years as Cincinnati’s relative importance declined.
The ngram viewer is a fun tool play with, so check it out.
This really helps to explain Cincinnati and St. Louis. They’ve simply fallen further than most metros and are left with a past that overshadows the present to a greater degree than other cities. The sense of loss in lifelong Cincinnatians is nothing short of tragic. Every change in Cincinnati, even those that are economically beneficial, is bemoaned as a threat. I don’t know of another American city that inspires such morbid devotion.
In earlier days (well into my lifetime) “Hollywood” was often used as a term for Los Ángeles as a whole, like we often use “DC” to describe the whole Washington DC region. And did you try “LA”?
Seattle is a SUNbelt city? (I kid, I kid)
I wonder what the statistical explanation is for why all the cities take a dive around 2000. My guess is that it’s a artifact of what sources Google indexes – perhaps around that time they start indexing some source that doesn’t talk about cities as much (blogs? magazines? e-mails?) But there might be a way to create some sort of index of city mentions overall and see what percentage of them are to any given city, that would avoid some overall trends of that sort.
Plug in “Indy” for Indianapolis and you get an astonishing different result.