Omni connexae!
25th September 2011, 12:07
This is Ngram viewer (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/).
Since a while back, Google have been scanning and digitizing books. They've done 15 million to date.
What this means is, we can use computational methods to read all of the books with the click of a button. If we single out high quality books, what we are left with is 500 billion words. A string of text 1000 times longer then the human genome. It's sort of like a 'cultural genome'! :o
All the data has now been released to the public, and everyone can now use Ngram to plot the data with ease.
We can use it to measure cultural trends and events. For example, it's actually possible to see when suppression and propaganda is being used regarding certain ideologies, ideas and people.
I find this resource fascinating, and have been playing around with it this morning. Here's a few of the things I tried:
Love and Fear
http://i55.tinypic.com/24cth77.jpg
Notice how much we have been using the word Love since 2001... Interesting.
Rational, Practical, Emotional and Spiritual
http://i54.tinypic.com/14ios5d.jpg
We use spiritual a lot more, recently. But emotional and rational seems to have taken a dive.
Illuminati and NWO
http://i56.tinypic.com/21dkhsi.jpg
A huge spike for the word Illuminati just before the 1920s. Suprisingly, the term 'NWO' was actually used more before 2001 then after. :confused:
This data is a such a useful source, with almost infinite possibilities! I'm interested in what you guys think, and would love to see what you tried, and hear your speculation regarding what you found. =)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDzBmqhhc-E
Further reading: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturomics)
Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts.[1][2] Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage.[3] The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.[4] Michel and Aiden helped create the Google Labs project Google Ngram Viewer which uses n-gram's to analyze the Google Book digital library for cultural patterns in language use over time. In another study called Culturnomics 2.0, Kalev H. Leetaru examined news archives including print and broadcast media (television and radio transcripts) for words that imparted tone or "mood" as well as geographic data.[5][6] The research was able to retroactively predict the 2011 Arab Spring and successfully estimate the final location of Osama Bin Laden to within 124 miles
Since a while back, Google have been scanning and digitizing books. They've done 15 million to date.
What this means is, we can use computational methods to read all of the books with the click of a button. If we single out high quality books, what we are left with is 500 billion words. A string of text 1000 times longer then the human genome. It's sort of like a 'cultural genome'! :o
All the data has now been released to the public, and everyone can now use Ngram to plot the data with ease.
We can use it to measure cultural trends and events. For example, it's actually possible to see when suppression and propaganda is being used regarding certain ideologies, ideas and people.
I find this resource fascinating, and have been playing around with it this morning. Here's a few of the things I tried:
Love and Fear
http://i55.tinypic.com/24cth77.jpg
Notice how much we have been using the word Love since 2001... Interesting.
Rational, Practical, Emotional and Spiritual
http://i54.tinypic.com/14ios5d.jpg
We use spiritual a lot more, recently. But emotional and rational seems to have taken a dive.
Illuminati and NWO
http://i56.tinypic.com/21dkhsi.jpg
A huge spike for the word Illuminati just before the 1920s. Suprisingly, the term 'NWO' was actually used more before 2001 then after. :confused:
This data is a such a useful source, with almost infinite possibilities! I'm interested in what you guys think, and would love to see what you tried, and hear your speculation regarding what you found. =)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDzBmqhhc-E
Further reading: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturomics)
Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts.[1][2] Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage.[3] The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.[4] Michel and Aiden helped create the Google Labs project Google Ngram Viewer which uses n-gram's to analyze the Google Book digital library for cultural patterns in language use over time. In another study called Culturnomics 2.0, Kalev H. Leetaru examined news archives including print and broadcast media (television and radio transcripts) for words that imparted tone or "mood" as well as geographic data.[5][6] The research was able to retroactively predict the 2011 Arab Spring and successfully estimate the final location of Osama Bin Laden to within 124 miles