Scientific evidence could mean anything really. It could refer to blood analysis, ballistics, test results. There are many forms of scientific evidence, but I am not sure as to what they are looking for exactly. With scientific evidence, I expected there to be a presence of the phrase in writing. I expected for it to really start in the 1970’s and for there to be a gradual incline from that decade on through the 2000’s. Here are my findings from the Brigham Young University Time Magazine Corpus of American English (Figure 4).
Figure 4. This is a screenshoot taken by my MacBook Pro of the the Time Magazine Corpus Text Mine of “scientific evidence”.
This is a key on how to read what is given:
1. BAR- Each bar indicates the relative frequency of the word, group of words, phrase, or grammatical constructions in each of the nine decades in the corpus — the 1920s through the 2000s. If the search was for an exact word or string, then click on this bar to see the Keyword in Context display. If not, then you can click on this bar to see a list of matching words or strings, sorted by the section on which you click.
2. PER MIL- The frequency of the matching strings per million words.
3. SIZE- The size of the section in millions of words.
4. FREQ- The raw frequency of the matching strings in each register.
It’s very clear that in the 1950’s the phrase scientific evidence was being used then it increased in the 1960’s. In the 1970’s, something happened that I was not expecting. The use of the phrase decreased and there are multiple reasons why this could be. The only real thing is that there were other things going on at that time. It could have been the 18th amendment in 1971. Maybe it was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Watergate Scandal, and the U.S. presidential election in 1972. Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 could have been the key. Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record and President Nixon resigning in 1974 were pretty big occurrences that happened. Whatever the reason, in the 1970’s Time Magazine stopped writing about scientific evidence as much because there were more important things to be talked about in the 1970’s.
Now in the 1980’s through the 2000’s, there was drastic increase instead of gradual incline as you can see. The reasoning I attest to October 6, 2000 which as I mentioned was the date that CSI was invented. I also feel that the science has progressed to the point where it was mentioned very often. Next, I will change the type of evidence that I am discussing.
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