Started playing around with Google Ngram, after stumbling across the hilarious TED talk in which it was introduced.* Plugged in some museum-related terms until I found a pattern without an obvious (to me) explanation.

If you're bored, have a look at this graph: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=informal+learning%2Cmuseum+education&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=5&smoothing=0

--What happened in the world in 1939 that caused the terms "museum education" and "informal learning" to peak at the same time?
--What brought "museum education" to its second-highest peak in 1996, at the same time that "informal learning" took a dip?
--What the heck happened in informal education in 1998?

(Note: I haven't really looked into data factors that might affect the graph. Like: the keyword search function is case sensitive; this search looked at sources in British English and American English combined; frequency is based on the total of other 2-word phrases, etc.)

*http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html

Okay, back to work.

Caitlin

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