Now here is an interesting exercise. The New York Times has put up a very simple webpage called Chronicle that lets you enter a term, and it will show you how often that word has been used in articles from 1860 until now. It can be incredibly interesting to see how linguistic trends sometimes mirror actual societal/political/economic trends when tracking terms like war or recession, however I, of course, wanted to see how some technology terms were represented.

You can see in the graph below that the term ‘computer‘ started to come in to use in the late 1950s, and had a huge peak around 2000. Both of those make sense; although the government had relied on computing machines for quite some time, during this decade we saw the introduction of the UNIVAC which was the first machine that was used by a business, the development of the FORTRAN and COBOL programming languages, creation of the transistor, even the cover of TIME magazine trumpeting a new computer system and its benefits.

Use of ‘Computer’ in NYT articles since 1860

The graph below shows the use of the term ‘Technology’ over the same time period, and it closely mirrors what we saw above. It also shows that several terms can be combined for the purposes of comparison, as I have done with ‘Computer,’ Technology’ and ‘Digital.’ The trend for ‘Technology’ starts around the 20s when we saw the introduction and general acceptance of Radio and other advancements, and ‘Digital’ taking off areound the ’80s when vacuum tubes started to be widely replaced by integrated circuits in consumer devices.

Use of ‘Computer,’ ‘Technology’ and ‘Digital’ in NYT articles since 1860

And then of course my favorite graph, by which I mean the most depressing – ‘Kardashian.’

I won’t dignify this with a caption

I find it most interesting to see how certain terms reflect the social interests of the time. You’d expect that, but some surprising results can be found as well. If you discover anything unusual, let us know.