See this NYT article for an explanation.
With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.
The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words that are contained in books published between 1800 and 2000 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew.
The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool also allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming video game Angry Birds.
I don't even play Angry Birds but I could play this all day long. For example, wondering if the internet really is killing journalism? The graph suggests perhaps.
And in this one we see that bicycle lanes clearly have no impact on global warming.
The dip at the end of this one suggests that NFL defenses may finally be reclaiming the upper hand.
This seems about right.
As does the obligatory comparison.
My favorite so far compares seven common vices. I wish these graphs were embeddable but you should really click on this one and take a close look. I find it interesting to see narcotics, prostitution and even gambling all appear to have peaked while liquor and bacon are in the midst of a resurgence.
We could go on and on making more and more nonsensical graphs, and, since we are attracted to the power of lines on a graph to "prove" whatever point we assign to them, we probably will keep making them.
I mean, clearly "Don't ask" and "Don't tell" have been in decline since 2002 at the latest. In light of this, is today's cloture vote on repealing the policy any surprise?
*T.K.G.O.T.W. always requires a h/t to Timshel
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