For this week’s practicum, I decided to use the Google Ngram Viewer to look up the word Diwali. I decided to use this word because today is Diwali, the Hindu celebration of lights. I also wanted to see if there were any trends, seeing as there are higher Indian populations in America and other western countries now than there have been in the past. Here’s the Ngram:

As you can see, there is a sharp increase after the 1940’s and especially after 1950. This is  really interesting to me and by far the best part about the Ngram Viewer. It’s so easy to see changes over time and so many historical events can be correlated or contributed to these trends.