Google’s N-gram viewer allows you to watch the prevalence of certain words or phrases among the vast library of books that the company has been digitizing. As such, it’s a powerful tool for seeing patterns in our culture – so much so that it’s become a basic tool in the new field of culturomics, the computational analysis (and prediction) of human culture through the analysis of large-scales bodies of texts.
For example, use of the term resilience has more than doubled since 1990. More interestingly, here the graphs for five terms: ecological resilience, economic resilience, psychological resilience, community resilience, and social resilience:
You can literally watch the meme being born. (And a shoutout to my friend and colleague Charles Rutheiser for this idea.)
Image credit: Liftoff of Vega VV01