Great blog. The author, incidentally, is a youngish historian named Ben Schmidt. I feel like it's a natural fit with an HN audience given how data-driven his work is, but as you say, it doesn't break through very much.

He also created (helped create?) a tool called Bookworm that might be of interest: http://bookworm.culturomics.org

Thanks! The Bookworm link doesn't work right now, but I found this demo video very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kAlwiXt0bY