Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages
December 20, 2010
Source: Discover, Dec 16, 2010
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Harvard University researchers have been analyzing the more than 15 million books scanned by Google, which created a massive electronic library that represents 12% of all the books ever published.
Harvard University researchers have been analyzing the more than 15 million books scanned by Google, which created a massive electronic library that represents 12% of all the books ever published.As the team says, the corpus “will furnish a great cache of bones from which to reconstruct the skeleton of a new science.”
There are strong parallels to the completion of the human genome. Just as that provided an invaluable resource for biologists, Google’s corpus will allow social scientists and humanities scholars to study human culture in a rigorous way. There’s a good reason that the team is calling this field “culturomics.”
The team has tracked and stored the frequency of billions or words, or sets of words, over time. The result is a “big table” that you can download and explore at www.culturomics.org. Otherwise, you can play around with Google’s real-time browser.
The team also found that new technology permeates through our culture with growing speed. By scanning the corpus for 154 inventions created between 1800-1960, from microwave ovens to electroencephalographs, they found that more recent ones took far less time to become widely discussed.
Ref.: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644
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