Comments on: They’re Talking About Us (Still) (Again) (Always)

By: jeans

jeans — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:19:06 +0000

Why does Porter Rockwell get such a spike in the Depression years?

By: michelle

michelle — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:24:56 +0000

This could be way too much fun to play with. I’ve enjoyed the posts y’all have done so far. I went and fiddled and was interested to see what didn’t show up at all!

By: Ziff

Ziff — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 04:29:41 +0000

Awesome, Ardis!

I find the Holy Ghost/Holy Spirit figure interesting, particularly that “Holy Spirit” has experienced a revival (ha ha) of late (post WWII). I’m sure someone who actually knows about religious trends in that time frame can explain this by reference to an increase in membership of Pentecostal churches or something.

By: Vada

Vada — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:56:07 +0000

One thing I noticed with your graphs is how most religious terms seem to have a general falling off (Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, Koran, Bible). I would predict similar trends for other religious terms. My guess is it’s due not so much to people not printing as much about religion or a particular religion, but (with the ease of publishing greatly increasing) due to books on other subjects being published much more than they were 200 years ago. Now I’ll have to go play some, too.

By: Phoebe

Phoebe — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:50:02 +0000

Fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to post this, Ardis. I’ve spent a lot of time in the expanding online newspaper archives. I didn’t know that there was such widespread interest in Utah and news from there in the late 1880s during the Raid years.

By: kevinf

kevinf — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:30:41 +0000

Neat stuff. I have heard about this Google project on NPR, but haven’t had the chance to play around with it. Now I’m motivated.