The upside is that I have a nifty new toy.  I give to you, the Google Ngram viewer.  This neat little widget searches the text of many, many books published between 1800 and 2000, and will graph the frequency of usage of any words you choose.  I had a great deal of fun with this tonight, playing around with different words and combinations and speculating about why the graphs look the way they do.

For example:

This graph shows the frequency of use of the word “miracle” and the word “disaster” in books between 1800 and 2000. The blue line is “miracle”, and the red line is “disaster”.

You can click the image to go to the website, but you can see from the graph that they sort of swap places in terms of popularity right around 1900.  I don’t know enough about history to be able to really speculate on why that is, but I think it’s interesting.  I played with all kinds of words this way, for about an hour and a half, trying to glean some kind of knowledge or understanding from them.  I admit, I didn’t get very far, but it was fascinating to me anyway.

Here’s the kicker, though.  As interesting as the graphs and the data are, let’s take a moment to talk about how interesting it is that such a gadget exists at all.  What an astounding world we live in today, that with a few keystrokes and a click, I can search thousands of books published over the course of two centuries for specific words and have that information in less than seconds!

I forget, honestly, what life was like before the internet, when writing reports meant trekking to the library and spending time flipping through a paper card catalog looking for research materials, paging through actual paper encyclopedias, gnashing my teeth because someone else had the volume for B-C and I had to wait for them to finish.  Remember microfiche?  I do.

When I finish writing this, it will be automatically posted to Facebook for me, and any one of the hundreds of my Facebook friends can read it, or they all can, at once.  They can pass it on with a click.  This one blog post will be available all over the globe within seconds of me publishing it, and may even be translated automatically into different languages.

At a time when information is so easily accessed, across distance and cultures, when information can be and is shared freely across most of humanity, 24 hours a day, is it any wonder that I often feel so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff there is to know?  And isn’t it also amazing that, despite the ease of learning about virtually anything, that there’s still so much ignorance in our world?