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WOWSERS. APPARENTLY A CHAP NAMED Chris Harrison, who happens to be a Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, has put together this amazing looking infographic on how “he” and “she” are used in Google’s digital books archive, which now contains 200 years worth of published material. (Completely mind blowing, right?!) The graph shows the 120 most common words used after “he” and “she,” ordered in decreasing frequency. Like I said: wow. But how are we to interpret such a thing?

My first was reaction was to to see how this collection of 200 years of published material completely reaffirms age-old gender addages that us women are the passive feelers (“she loves” and “she learns” and “she gives”) while the men are out beating their chests and asserting themselves (“he believes” and “he argues” and “he became”).

I was amused to read that this conclusion on stereotypical gender roles wasn’t the first thing that jumpped out to Harrison. When asked by feministing.com what he found the most interesting about his findings, he responded: “Not any one thing was most interesting. As with many large data sets, there are many fascinating patterns. It is analogous to a single thread being rather unremarkable. From from many threads one can weave a tapestry.” Spoken like a true engineer!

Care to weigh in? (When you uncross your eyes from following all those tiny, criss-crossing lines, that is.)

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