Clio Wired (History 696)

The first comes from the Moodographer website. If you don't know Moodographer, their site description explains:

Moodgrapher plots the mood levels reported by LiveJournal users in their posts during the last days, updated every 10 minutes. Two numbers are reported by Moodgrapher: the percentage of posts reporting a certain mood (the dashed, black line below), and the "rate of change" of a mood — the difference between the usual amount of posts with this mood and the amount in a given hour (this is the continuous red line below).

So, an example of a Moodographer graph with historical utility would be:

This graph shows the frequency of "worried" in the LiveJournal.com blogsphere on the days when Katrian roared ashore on the Gulf Coast.

Example number two comes from the Baby Name Wizard at iVillage.com. Here are two graphs of baby name frequency in the United States over time.

Theodore (my first name):

Nona:

Sorry Nona, but Theodore topped out at 38th in the first decade of the 20th century with an average of over 2,000 babies per year getting stuck with my name. Nona topped out at 317th in the 1890s, with only a few more than 150 babies per year getting your name. You can all see that "Nona" and "Theodore" are now decidely retro names.

The third example comes from theyrule.net. This is a Flash application that allows you to visualize the relationship between members of the boards of director of the largest companies in the United States. So, for instance, if you wanted to see how the boards of Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics (two defense contracting behemoths) were connected, the visual example would look like this:

You can see that three men link these two boards together. But what about their links to other corporate boards? That graphic looks like this:

Now the interlocking nature of corporate leadership becomes more apparent.

The final example has to do with the use of words in the English language. Wordcount.org tracks the usage of words in the English language--written and spoken. Their About page says:

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage.

So, my own test was to enter the word Stalin, a word that came up often in my East European history class this afternoon. The result looks like this:

Uncle Joe's name turns out to be in 9,516th place in terms of usage. I found it somewhat interesting to note that just ahead of "Stalin" in terms of usage was "sexy". Go figure. And, because inquiring minds want to know, I decided to see if this site has any sort of feature that tracks queries. And, of course, they do. Here is the result of their query tracking. No surprises here! If you are offended by four letter words, stop looking now and hit the back button on your browser.

All humor aside, I think you can see how an historian might use a system like this. Imagine feeding in the 30,000+ personal narratives collected in the September 11 Digital Archive and subjecting them to this kind of analysis.

These are some of my favorite examples. I'd be interested to learn what yours are...