Google Books Sparks Revolution
Using Google Books, scientists have digitally scanned every page of every book ever published. The findings of the ambitious and controversial project were published in Science.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
A single person, or indeed a team of people, can read only so many books. Large-scale number-crunching seemed an impossible task. Now, though, Jean-Baptiste Michel, of Harvard University, and his colleagues have used Google Books to do just that. They report their first results in this week’s Science. Dr Michel and his team hope that their approach will spur a more rigorous, quantitative approach to the study of human culture. In fact, their paper doubles as a manifesto for a new discipline. They dub it “culturomics”, making them the first clutch of culturomists. More are sure to follow—whether or not this particular, clunking neologism survives.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
