There is no place like ether

A  new technology getting old, on my way to work. Oxford St., Cambridge, MA.

Google’s scribes have been incredibly busy digitizing books over the last few years. There are now so many books that stating the latest statistics would be impertinent: much like the free storage space of a gmail account, the books are joining the virtual library at a very, very fast pace. Social sciences have been sitting on the Google fence here, somewhat fascinated with the new possibilities of the medium, but also concerned with its limits and potential downsides (the fate and future of the book being a primary concern for many of us bibliophiles). In any cases, the digitization of books radically changed research methods: a concept or an author, or a term, can now be tracked in minutes within an entire book. The traditional index has been transmuted into another, literal index: CTRL-F.

It was simply a question of time before we could track the rise and fall of concepts through the entire Google books library. With this browsing technology, a new field, bordering quantitative research, has emerged: Culturomics.

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 Google Books NGram Viewer allows search through the whole library and displays the trend results (…no results for “culturomics”). The evident problem is the size of the archive itself: what we browse remains a chosen, selected, 4%. However, for those inclined to locate conceptual trends, this tool will constitute a great point of departure, rather than an end to itself, much like bibliometric analyses.

via Oh, the humanity | Harvard Gazette.

See also Steven Pinker’s website.