Monument Reviewer restoring the landscape

from NY Times

Franconia (New Hampshire) — There is no replacing the Old Man of the Mountain, the beloved natural landmark that tumbled from its craggy perch at Franconia Notch State Park in 2003, sending this state into deepest grief.

But now, if you visit the old viewing area, line yourself up behind a device that resembles a giant upside-down hockey stick with bumps on it, and squint, you can glimpse the Old Man’s stern profile on the side of the cliff where it used to be.

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Transportation

Isn't any kind of analyst or scientist simply a fan of Google Trends, Google Correlate, and Google Ngram Viewer. You have to probably be an equally big fan of the brand mentioned as the first word in the names of those three wonderful online analysis tools above.

It is so easy: from a browser alone you can begin to think how to use the tools before even starting them (and no "learning the program" period, because you already know the language that they operate in). The search engine does it for you by a cool added algorithm that shows the timeline of your search.

Try it.

For instance, type in "transportation".

One of the search results is going to show you the timeline of references to the word.

It starts with the beginning of eighteenth century.

Next, you can choose time slices.

For instance, choose 1700-1750 to see all the available documents from the period.

You can then go through the time-slices (even by years) individually and weave a story that can from there be analyzed in context.

Later bring your own set of data into tools.

The only obstacle right now to infinite possibilities for deeper analysis and more sophisticated queries are the percentages of the publishers' (but not necessarily owners') claimed values of those archives, books, newspapers scanned and transcribed and made into a database.