I'll Probably Quit Doing This Too

Nieman Journalism Lab:

If newspapers are the first draft of history, then consider these the first sketches.

In the video above, San Diego developer and artist Tim Schwartz shows off several visualizations of history he created with The New York Times’ entire 158-year corpus as his dataset. They are alternately quirky, beautiful, and probing — hundreds of millions of words synthesized into coherent, historical portraits.

Seriously, take 2 minutes and watch the above. Of note: “Theatre” becomes “Theater” in 1945, Billionaire makes its first appearance in the 1930’s, etc. Then Tim shows you his “command center” and you’re kind of freaked out.