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Narrative maps are fascinating attempts to frame the evolution of various theories building the foundation of a political economy. Ben Hunt, for example, formulates narrative maps to categorize and compare economic keywords or phrases across huge troves of mainstream news data (for his blog, Epsilon Theory). Hunt maps key terms such as inflation or austerity, multiplied by more grand narrative categories such as The Golden Age of the Central Banker.
Categorizing and mapping narratives across thousands of news articles using Natural Language Processing is certainly glorious. However, to try to build a narrative map of my own design, I was fixated by a simpler (and perhaps underestimated) tool: Google Trends. While it is difficult to gain insight on sophisticated stories such as Abstraction in Financial Markets using Google Trends alone, it a notable proxy metric for worldwide interest in the exploration of a given topic.
Measuring Google Trends for a wide variety of powerful economic terms may inspire a special kind of speculative insight for the intellectual wanderer. Of course, we are mapping apples to oranges to economic austerity. However, the fates of these various terms and theories are…
