Given a big corpus of literature one of the fun things to do is look at how the use of a term has changed over time. When did people first use a particular word? When did one word start to replace another, etc.? Google's Ngram Viewer is perhaps the best known tool for exploring these questions.

One feature I've always wanted to have in BioNames is a timeline of taxonomic names. ION has one (see here), but I wanted a way to go from the timeline to the actual publications. In other words, if, say, there were approximately 99 bird names published in 2012, I want to see the papers that published those names.

Time for a quick and dirty Friday afternoon hack. Based on responses to the BHL timeline I released two days ago, I've created a version that can compare the history of two names using sparklines (created using Google's Chart API). I use sparklines to give a quick summary of hits over time (grouped by decade). The demo is here. It's crude (minimal error checking, no progress bars while it talks to BHL), but it's home time.