Wednesday, January 05, 2011

The Information Revolution as seen in Google NGram Viewer

The work "telegraph" had a long run in English language books, albeit always at a relatively low frequency.
"Telephone", of course, started later in the literature but rose faster and stayed higher. "Television" raised to a peak in frequency during World War II, then trailed off but to a higher plateau than "radio". "Computer" peaked in the 1980s, but has continued at quite a high plateau. "Internet" was still on the rise by 2000. Google NGram Viewer provides a means for quantifying our otherwise impressionistic view of the history of the Information Revolution.
I add the word "print" to go back to the pre-electronic era of the information revolution.

1 comment:

gigabiting said...

The Google labs Ngram Viewer is either the greatest research tool since the Dewey Decimal System or the internet’s most colossal, pernicious time suck.
http://gigabiting.com/?p=6828/