Reading a collection of stories in the Atlantic about women and technology I came across a story about The Wedding Data: What Marriage Notices Say About Social Change. This article talks about Weding Crunchers – a database of New York Times wedding announcements since 1981 that you can search in an environment much like Google’s Ngram viewer. In the chart above you can see that I searched for different professions. Note how “teacher” takes off, probably because of the popularity of Teach for America.
I can’t help wondering if we are seeing the emergence of a genre of text visualization – the diachronic word viewer. This type of visualization depends on an associations between orthographic words (the actual words in texts) and concepts.