Jer Thorp has created a fantastic set of visualizations, now available on Flickr, that use the new Article Search API from the New York Times to show the connections between the top ideas of each year from 1984 until the present.
Randall Hand
Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.