I'm a bit confused about the scales you are using on your graphs: in your original post, word counts were in the thousands; here they are expressed in decimal points. Have you changed your scale, or are the words invoked above really so rare that they only have .2 or so occurrences in relation to the total amount of text in a specific article? I'm a bit curious as to how you're justifying the trend here against a scale that is astronomically larger amongst the other words. As I am writing a post in response to your articles I would appreciate you sending me a better explanation of your methodology via e-mail. Your points are compelling, but "population genetics" seems to be used the same amount as "deism" was probably used in 1791; I don't think that anyone back then would agree that in this perceived rise lies the seeds of a ubiquitous theory.

Walker, this is probably because he has log-scaled the Y-axis so it is easier to see the trends. This would imply that there were a much greater number of articles compared to the ones thrown up in the previous search for humanities articles in which he didn't need to tinker with the Y axis to get a decent graph.

ok scratch that, looking at it again the antilog would result in 1 paper. He/she has transformed the y-axis to make the trends easier to see.

Maybe my wording was a bit vague, but the data-points are:

# of articles with keyword / # of articles containing a neutral word

It's like how many people are sick, vs. what fraction of the whole population is sick. I'm estimating total population size by getting all articles containing variants of 4 highly frequent words -- admittedly that's not perfect, although if I could search for "the", I would miss no articles, because "the" is so frequent.

The important thing is that I'm comparing the change over time of keywords to change over time in neutral words, so I'm picking out only the changes over time that are unique to keywords, rather than those that apply to words in general.

Agnostic, instead of going into these discussions on the graph technics, I am more interested in getting to know the origin of your frustration that makes you put so much effort in this. I don't feel the need to defend this loose group of academics you are criticising, neither myself (that is: I don't count myself among them), but I wonder if you have actually read through some of these (recent) articles, instead of only counting them? (I guess your own article would also be counted among those that quote these terms).
I mean: a lot of people (maybe not enough yet) know that words such as postmodernism etc. do not refer (anymore) to a theory, but to a collection of ideas that aim(ed) at describing social, cultural, political, ... dynamics, including historical interpretation. If you are really serious about reflecting on how we can engage in critical discourse 'for the better of society', you should accept that we need some kind of vocabulary to understand each other, and that, for the very reason that they have been used before, these terms are part of it. The next step is using them in a cautious, reflexive way. The articles that take this approach also exist. Maybe you should try to extract them out of your data. Only then the exercise would become interesting.

cheers
gaston

This is interesting, if not conclusive. We readers should be grateful he/she was willing to put this much effort into it.

That said, I really wish you would try to be and to sound more objective.

IMHO, feminism is very different than the other "isms" you mention here.