Let's start with just some of the basic wordcount results. Dan Cohen posted some similar things for the Victorian period on his blog, and used the numbers mostly to test hypotheses about change over time. I can give you a lot more like that (I confirmed for someone, though not as neatly as he'd probably like, that 'business' became a much more prevalent word through the 19C). But as Cohen implies, such charts can be cooler than they are illuminating.
But you can get into some interesting analysis even just at the wordcount level. Look at this chart (sorry if it's small):
The red line is the frequency of the word 'evolution'; the green one, 'efficiency.' (I'll put a post at some point on how to read these graphs better.) Each one of those terms gets a week in your typical intellectual history survey, and each one has a canonical author associated with it. (If you're a little fuzzy, Darwin's Origin of the Species is 1859; Taylor's Scientific Management is 1911, Shop Management 1903). And sure enough, both climb out of the ocean of insignificant words around the time we'd expect them to.
But look at the differences between the two. "Evolution" starts its climb shortly after Darwin publishes (the real spike in the data seems to be 1864, which gives Americans a chance to make it through that book), and rises in prominence for decades. "Efficiency," on the other hand, increases in prominence five times in the first fifteen years of the century, before leveling off a bit. Taylor's most famous work is at middle of the curve, and his first one is part of the rise, not before it. Both words show a major addition to shared cultural vocabulary, but the way they are taken in shows they are two very different intellectual movements.
