Thanks to the work of devoted fans, virtually every answer from Alex Trebek’s 30-year reign on Jeopardy! is recorded at j-archive.com. These 256,000 clues amount to one weird and revealing record of our time.
You can see for yourself below. Just put a topic in the
search box below, and see how often it’s been used on Jeopardy!–and how
it compares to other answer. Hint: Justin Bieber is now beating
Einstein.
To search different Jeopardy! clues, separate them by
commas and press search. “Cats, dogs” will show how often cats have
appeared on the show versus dogs.
J-Grams allows you to watch trends come and go. Let’s dig in.
There are always alarmists who believe our best days are behind us. This graph will not assuage their fears:
This graph shows how frequently the terms “Abraham Lincoln” and “iPod” have appeared in Jeopardy! clues from 1985 to today.
By the looks of it, Honest Abe will soon be usurped by the iPod on Jeopardy!. The show seem to be less interested these days in the old than in the new:
We're also apparently losing our religion:
Before we get carried away, lamenting some uniquely “millennial” decline, we should keep in mind that lighter entertainment has always dominated on Jeopardy!:
It has always been a family show:
So it’s not actually clear that Jeopardy!
has turned its back on a more serious past. Breaking down the
centuries, you find that it’s actually the 1800s that earn the most
mentions on the show:
As for this century, Boomers win—we’re still most obsessed with the sixties:
As
soon as J-Grams was born, my first instinct was to go searching for
familiar names and toys and TV shows from the past. There’s something
about a tool like this that breeds nostalgia.
As it turns out, the show itself is nostalgic too. Fads that appeared and quickly faded actually became fodder for Jeopardy! clues many years later. There’s a clear pattern: a short-lived high hump of excitement, a dormant period and then a nostalgic resurgence.
One
wonders whether the same thing will happen to, say, some of the great
television of the mid-90s, like “Home Improvement,” “The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air,” and “Family Matters.” Are we just now in the fallow period,
awaiting a nostalgic callback?
Of course, some things might be best left behind, and there is evidence that they will be:
The
top three U.S. colleges in 2014 according to the U.S. News & World
Report are Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, in that order. In the world of Jeopardy!, however, Harvard is the clear favorite by a factor of almost 3 to 1:
By
1985, VHS and Betamax were still competing, though it seemed as though
the latter was on its last legs. If you’d looked at the Jeopardy! clues from that year, you would have seen the writing on the wall:
It’s worth asking: Are there any technologies today that are similarly doomed, but we just don’t know it yet? Can Jeopardy! clues predict the future?
In a world of ascendant tech companies, the old king, Microsoft, seems to be on its way out—at least in the land of Trebek.
Of course, sometimes Jeopardy! seems out of touch. For instance, even though video games are a $70 billion industry, to the film industry’s $95 billion, Jeopardy! gives them short shrift:
Jeopardy!’s
clues are carefully curated. And so to the extent that they offer a
distorted picture of our world, you’d expect that picture to be
distorted in a good way: overly intellectual, neutral and
open-minded, something like a quiz show Pleasantville. But sometimes
they do no better than the real world:
Good and bad, old and new—there is plenty more where this came from. Try J-Grams yourself and see what you can uncover!
There are always alarmists who believe our best days are behind us. This graph will not assuage their fears:
This graph shows how frequently the terms “Abraham Lincoln” and “iPod” have appeared in Jeopardy! clues from 1985 to today.
By the looks of it, Honest Abe will soon be usurped by the iPod on Jeopardy!. The show seem to be less interested these days in the old than in the new:
We're also apparently losing our religion:Before we get carried away, lamenting some uniquely “millennial” decline, we should keep in mind that lighter entertainment has always dominated on Jeopardy!:It has always been a family show:So it’s not actually clear that Jeopardy!
has turned its back on a more serious past. Breaking down the
centuries, you find that it’s actually the 1800s that earn the most
mentions on the show:As for this century, Boomers win—we’re still most obsessed with the sixties:As
soon as J-Grams was born, my first instinct was to go searching for
familiar names and toys and TV shows from the past. There’s something
about a tool like this that breeds nostalgia.
As it turns out, the show itself is nostalgic too. Fads that appeared and quickly faded actually became fodder for Jeopardy! clues many years later. There’s a clear pattern: a short-lived high hump of excitement, a dormant period and then a nostalgic resurgence.
One
wonders whether the same thing will happen to, say, some of the great
television of the mid-90s, like “Home Improvement,” “The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air,” and “Family Matters.” Are we just now in the fallow period,
awaiting a nostalgic callback?Of course, some things might be best left behind, and there is evidence that they will be:The
top three U.S. colleges in 2014 according to the U.S. News & World
Report are Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, in that order. In the world of Jeopardy!, however, Harvard is the clear favorite by a factor of almost 3 to 1:By
1985, VHS and Betamax were still competing, though it seemed as though
the latter was on its last legs. If you’d looked at the Jeopardy! clues from that year, you would have seen the writing on the wall:It’s worth asking: Are there any technologies today that are similarly doomed, but we just don’t know it yet? Can Jeopardy! clues predict the future?In a world of ascendant tech companies, the old king, Microsoft, seems to be on its way out—at least in the land of Trebek.
Of course, sometimes Jeopardy! seems out of touch. For instance, even though video games are a $70 billion industry, to the film industry’s $95 billion, Jeopardy! gives them short shrift:
Jeopardy!’s
clues are carefully curated. And so to the extent that they offer a
distorted picture of our world, you’d expect that picture to be
distorted in a good way: overly intellectual, neutral and
open-minded, something like a quiz show Pleasantville. But sometimes
they do no better than the real world:Good and bad, old and new—there is plenty more where this came from. Try J-Grams yourself and see what you can uncover!
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