Along the same lines of my entry about Chirag Mehta's Presidential tagclouds, Alex shares a graph generated by a student of his, which charts yearly the number of times that the phrase "civil rights" has appeared in the NY Times over the past 150 years or so.
Interesting on its own, but it's also suggestive of all sorts of similar work that could be done on the same scale and/or smaller scales, as a means of charting the relative success or saturation of particular buzz phrases and words. Alex notes the dip in usage of "civil rights" right after 2001, and I would guess that similar kinds of language patterns might be tied to all sorts of events.
Cool stuff.
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