Last year, in the process of writing an article for Environmental History titled “From Wild Lives to Wildlife and Back,” I created something like the chart below by hand in order to visualize changes in the usage of the terms “wild life” (two words) and “wildlife” (one word) over the twentieth century. The chart didn’t end up surviving into the published article, but it definitely helped me formulate my argument. Making it was painstaking, though — lots of cutting and pasting search results into an Excel worksheet. The Google Books Ngram Viewer, which went public as I was putting the finishing touches on the EH piece, makes this sort of thing much easier. Continue reading “graphing wildlife and wild life”