Google’s Ngram viewer allows the production of a graphic representation of the frequency with which words or phrases appear within the content Google can access by date. It can be used as a way to explore trends. Here are a couple of examples.
I have become interested in the concept of a “second brain”. The concept refers to the uses technology can serve in externalizing and extending brain functions such as storage and retrieval. Efforts are even being made to extend such obvious uses to the identification of associations. Recently, the phrase appears in several book titles.
It is hard to resist Googling yourself. Ngram appears to indicate that I am past my prime. I guess this makes sense because after my retirement from academia my name would appear less frequently in print.
I would think various trends could be proposed and investigated with this tool.
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