Google Ngram Experiments
informationisbeautiful.net
informationisbeautiful.net
The best example I've found is "king cotton" (the idea that European powers would intervene in the American civil war to protect their supplies of cotton): http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=king+cotton&y...
Another that compares a few and their cultural impact. Did you know that Phrenology probably had more cultural impact than UFO's did? http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Phrenology%2CSpir...
Here's a dead scientific theory: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=luminiferous&...
The success of a socio-political movement: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Woman%27s+Suffrag...
The death of Wade-Giles and rise of Pinyin for Chinese: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Peking%2CBeijing&...
I got totally addicted to this for 24 hours and couldn't do anything else. Completely amazing. I believe history now!
This statement makes so little sense ...
2nd I don't see how you've checked any data. Say you see word 'terror' is mentioned many times after 2001. What if most of the books say 9/11 was an inside job and there were no terrorist? The fact that the word 'terror' is used often in books doesn't mean there was actual terror going on.
Most interesting one I could find. Jesus hates swear words, apparently.
"Though it appeared in John Ash's 1775 A New and Complete Dictionary, listed as "low" and "vulgar," and appearing with several definitions,[10] fuck did not appear in any widely-consulted dictionary of the English language from 1795 to 1965. Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary (along with the word cunt) was in 1972. There is anecdotal evidence of its use during the American Civil War."
@tom: Ah, very interesting. OCR error would have been my second guess.
http://books.google.com/books?id=EIBIJunqzeUC&pg=PA278&#...
"War will fuck away their souls."
Also interesting: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=suck%2Cfuck&y...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013346
Surprisingly enough I could not get a hit with k-grams of
"Almost but not quite entirely unlike tea."
But k-grams of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" worked.
The datasets are just too large for my computer to handle.
Not that I'm complaining, but what happened during the 1920s?
Seriously - WW1 ended, and people began to understand the impact of technology.
Motorized and air transport, radio, Communism, womens rights and the rise to dominance of the US all were trends that were well underway in the 1920s, but were either non-existent or very rare in 1910.
Prior to WW1 (in Europe anyway), there was a distinct class-based disconnect on the impact of technology on society. Yes, the upper/political classes knew that it meant many more people had moved to the cities, and many industrialists were becoming rich.
But it was the impact of technology on warfare that forced the political classes to consider idea that technology leadership was a matter of national existence.
At the same time, the industrial scale of the war, and the huge number of people who lost their life led to wide-spread questioning of the political classes by the working class, which in turn led to an interest in the things that did affect them so much during the war: technology.
In the case of the opium wars, the "lesson" learnt was the same lesson as during the subjection of India and other European colonies, ie: the cultural superiority of the white man.
Obviously is retrospect this was the wrong lesson, but that's what people thought at the time.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Google%2CMicrosof...