Aiden and Michel’s (2013) book reveals how big data can help us understand how culture has changed.
I pulled this book, Uncharted (2013), by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, out of a bargain bin at Chapters a few weeks ago, and it is another example of serendipity. These Harvard PhDs collaborated with Google’s book digitization project to develop the Google Ngram tool. They liken their project to a tool to a microscope or telescope, which were tools that brought new dimensions to view for scientists. Their culture-scope is able to track uses of terms or phrases over time within Google Books’ enormous and growing database of digitized literature. They coined the term ‘culturomics‘, which is too awkward to stick, but the value is clear. Watch the holistic idea of ‘landscape’ overtake the aesthetically driven ‘scenery’ around the turn of the last century (below). Lots of food for thought in a world of Big Data.
Google Ngram View of landscape versus scenery in English text corpus, 1800 to 2000.
