I was working on a post that outlines my own version of “Text Analytics 101” that I have been using in freshmen writing classes for the past three years, and I found myself considering, momentarily, the uses of “text mining” versus “text analytics” and “data mining” versus “big data.” I’m sure there are distinctions to be made between the two terms, but it’s also the case that terms map onto various disciplines/domains and or historical moments. A quick ngram search in Google, which is based on Google Books, produced the following graph:

Data Mining vs Big Data

A similar search for the first pair produced the following:

Text Mining vs Text Analytics

The only thing the two graphs suggest to me is that, possibly, the latter terms appear later and thus haven’t made it into paper. I would like to do a similar search of ngrams on the web, but I haven’t found the same simple interface for doing this kind of quick survey.