Culturomics: hard + soft science using the Ngram viewer

Google ?????Google Refrigerator?
Google ?????Google Refrigerator? (Photo credit: Aray Chen)

I’ve been playing around with the new Google N Gram viewer and the emerging field of culturomics, the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. It’s interesting to see that Timothy was more common in 1920 and that information has grown faster than knowledge :) In 500 Billion Words, a New Window on Culture – NYTimes.com.