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My camera background is originally from film photography and I would always say roll of film and never say camera roll.
Perhaps this phrase may originate in Apple product terminology.
It seems an odd way to word it as it seems to refer to the device and not the end product.
There's no roll of camera to begin with and there's no film in the digital realm.
I would have suggested "film roll" but they didn't ask me.
Does camera roll perhaps derive from blog roll, that being a list of sites the blogger appreciates and promotes? I presume that further derives from attendance roll. In the Methodist tradition, one does not join the church until the age of 12, and the younger children of member families were entered in the church's cradle roll.
One thinks in the Hollywood tradition of "Roll 'Em!", meaning to start the movie cameras, and the scene action, but I think camera roll started being used when phones were still limited to still pics.
I admit I wasn't familiar with the term blog roll but had seen them without knowing the name. There's something illogical about the phrase Camera Roll to me. Perhaps the term may derive from the kind of endless loop of the images as you navigate through them. I first saw this visual representation of album covers on my iPod nano, which is my only Apple product. I think, without any research, that the Camera Roll phrase usage probably preceded blog roll's.
Well here's the Google Ngram for those terms. Not surprisingly, it all starts around the time moving pictures were invented. In these digital days, the use of "roll" in any form to describe a series of images is what we've called an "archaic" or "antiquated" word in other threads, or more generally, an "anachronism." A lot of this is driven by technology.
All for now. I'm heading into my home theater to see what's on the chip tonite. 🙂
I don't know enough about how ngram works to know if the order of the search terms is relevant. Specifically, does "camera roll" give the same results as "roll camera"? NB: I just tried it with two separate searches each with the different word order and the results appear to differ significantly. Now I wonder what's the significance of the different results. My idea was to attempt to eliminate the command phrase "roll, camera!" I don't know how to evaluate a lengthy gap in the corpus for "roll camera". I still need more ngram learning.
Ngrams has its limitations. It doesn't play well with punctuation, but will accept case-sensitives. The About Ngram Viewer page does have some helpful guidelines for usage. If you're gonna use Ngrams, it's definitely worth a look.
And yes, the order of the words makes a huge difference, since Ngrams matches your search query for the identical string in its corpus. The trickiest part about mastering Ngrams is choosing a sufficient number of words in that string to eliminate "false positives." You can't always do this unambiguously since you're limited to a maximum of 5 words.
For example, if you're looking for "camera roll" in the sense you meant it, and would like to to eliminate things like "I bumped my desk and watched my camera roll off onto the floor," you can try things like "camera roll displayed" or camera roll showed" or "on the camera roll" etc. You get the basic idea I'm sure.
Also note that this corpus is the result of scanning and OCRing "lots of books" with sometimes unusual fonts, so "lots of errors" sneak in. But Ngrams can still be quite useful investigating usage trends. It's a massive effort Google has committed to, and it's far from complete. For books that are only in printed form, they need to scan them 2 pages at a time, edit out margin notes and spots and stains, then "level" the lines of text so they can be more accurately OCRed.
I don't know for sure, but I think Ngrams was a spin-off from Google Books, once some genius realized they could do Ngrams with the same database.
It does take awhile to learn all the tools of Ngrams, and how to best use them. The "inflections," "wildcards," and "tags" provide some serious research tools. I rarely use them though. Pretty much all the Ngrams I've used in this forum are just straight word-based searches (including the one in this thread). But if you're serious about etymology, you should know how to use all those other types of searches.
Besides the Google About Ngram Viewer page, I found these short articles helpful. Ngram Compositions look intriguing but I'm unsure how to take advantage of them yet.
http://google.about.com/od/n/a/Google-Books-Ngram-Viewer.htm
Google Books Ngram Viewer
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/google-ngram-and-impact-as-a-verb
Google Ngram and "Impact" as a Verb
Thanks for those links. Read them both. It seems Google keeps adding new features to Ngrams. Like I said earlier, getting the corpus in digital form was the hard part, and is still a work in progress. Now comes the fun part as the computer braniacs come up with new code for accessing that corpus in creative ways. Still hoping they include punctuation at some point. I've occasionally been interested in searching for sequential vs hyphenated vs. joined words, as that is often the evolution of language. For example: first we wrote "on site" then we wrote "on-site" and now we write "onsite." There's lots of examples like that. But last I checked Ngrams was still ignoring hyphens.
Martha Barnette
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