Name: What we learned from 5 million books
Uploaded: 2011-09-20T15:38:56Z
Duration: 13 min 52 s
Description: Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books

What we learned from 5 million books

Culturomics, a method akin to genomics for culture, uses vast data to study human history, language, and societal shifts.

Data reveals censorship's impact on cultural discourse, showcasing suppression and propaganda through historical text analysis.

500 billion words from 5M books reveal shifts in language and culture, enabling analysis of historical trends and societal changes.