In a previous post, I expressed the feeling that artificial intelligence, data science and big data are currently “hot” in the news. One of my favorite news outlet (“Die Zeit”) has an open data policy in a sense that they have a public API. I thought it would be worth to check my feeling. I should mention that “Die Zeit” is not very technical or economic/finance oriented. Without further ado, here it is:

We see that, since the 1960s (that’s how long the access reaches back) the term “big data” has been included in 300 articles. You might wonder why I included English terms (e.g. “artificial intelligence”) and not the German translation “künstliche Intelligenz”. Well, actually I tried both terms (resulting in zero appearances of the German version). Apparently, “Die Zeit” prefers to use English terms whenever possible. Same applies for machine learning and open data.

Adding a time axis, we see that some topics are actually not “hot” news but have been around for a while. My favorite in this representation is “artificial intelligence” being “hot” news in the 80s and 90s :).

To sum up; buzzwords are sometimes “same same but different”.