Culture as Information made Visual by Line Graphs

That may be the title of my next thesis. I have been pondering the intersections of history, perception, information, visual culture, and the recent explosions in the availability of not only contemporary data/information, but also historical imagery (a post about the recently-expanded/revamped Library of Congress Digital Collections shall be forthcoming; honestly, I was perusing their archives yesterday, and I am astounded by how much it had grown since the last time I looked at it, which was only a few weeks ago. Nice work, gubmint!).

That said, there are some really interesting possibilities for the study of contemporary history (I know, kind of an odd phrase) being opened up by tools like Google Insights. I suppose there are serious concerns about bias inherent in using such methods to make assumptions about cultural trends (your results are defined by those who use Google, for starters) but it still some nice fodder for provoking thought.

David McCandless over at informationisbeautiful.net was doing some investigations on this front, showing the possibility to make evident at least a sliver of the zeitgeist that would otherwise pass mostly unnoticed just below the surface of social discourse:

Every April and November the issue flares up. Why?

April 20th is the anniversary of the Columbine Massacre. Though dimishing, the echoes of that event still reverberate through the group mind.

Not sure about the November peak? Maybe because Christmas video games are announced?