Oh, the humanity
Researchers have created a powerful new approach to scholarship, using approximately 4 percent of all books ever published as a digital “fossil record” of human culture. By tracking the frequency with which words appear in books over time, scholars can now precisely quantify a wide variety of cultural and historical trends. The four-year effort, led by Harvard University’s Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, is described this week in the journal Science. The team, made up of researchers from Harvard, Google, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary, has already used its approach — dubbed “culturomics,” by analogy with genomics — to gain insight into topics as diverse as humanity’s collective memory, the adoption of technology, the dynamics of fame, and the effects of censorship and propaganda. “Interest in computational approaches to the humanities and social sciences dates to the 1950s,” says Michel, a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and Program...