Google unveiled it's new Books Ngram Viewer last week, which tracks words indexed by Google Scholar, allowing any user to potentially trace cultural trends through archived literature.  The above n-gram tracks the prevalence of the words "television," "radio," "newspaper," and "Internet," with relatively predictable results as media has morphed throughout the past century.

Though the data trends are of course limited to Google's own "canon" (of indexed books), the results that CNET calls A Time Machine For Wordplay are utterly fascinating. Profound shifts in American philosophy over the past two centuries can be traced to the prevalence of usage of the words "Liberty" vs. "Freedom," which I found in Alexis Madrigal's article in The Atlantic.

Also amusing is the rise of Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies in recent Literature.